syntactic salt

sync | = S = | syntactic sugar

syntactic salt n.

The opposite of syntactic sugar, a feature designed to make it harder to write bad code. Specifically, syntactic salt is a hoop the programmer must jump through just to prove that he knows what's going on, rather than to express a program action. Some programmers consider required type declarations to be syntactic salt. A requirement to write `end if`, `end while`, `end do`, etc. to terminate the last block controlled by a control construct (as opposed to just `end`) would definitely be syntactic salt. Syntactic salt is like the real thing in that it tends to raise hackers' blood pressures in an unhealthy way. Compare candygrammar.

sync | = S = | syntactic sugar