In computer science, syntactic sugar is syntax within a programming language that is designed to make things easier to read or to express.
Building on Landin's distinction between essential language constructs and syntactic sugar, in 1991, Matthias Felleisen proposed a codification of "expressive power" to align with "widely held beliefs" in the literature.
[12] For example, Alan Perlis once quipped in "Epigrams on Programming", in a reference to bracket-delimited languages, that "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons".
[13] The metaphor has been extended by coining the term syntactic salt, which indicates a feature designed to make it harder to write bad code.
[21][22][23] Common examples include quote-delimited strings, curly braces for object and record types, and square brackets for arrays.