From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2007-07-18T13:18:52+09:00
Subject: Re: syntactic sugar buzz

On Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 12:40:12PM +0900, Phlip wrote:
> Jeff Pritchard wrote:
> 
> > I'm a relative newbie.  I'm finally getting the hang of some of the
> > syntactic sugar provided, such as the whole thing about using the "or"
> > operator to provide a default value if something is nil:
> >
> > foo = bar || "emptiness"
> 
> Please reserve the term "syntactic sugar" for cutesy systems that don't 
> provide for lean and incredibly expressive statements that scale very well!

I tend to use "syntactic sugar" to refer to a way to make something look
more succinct and pretty, but that isn't strictly necessary, e.g.:

  a, b = b, a

. . . is syntactic sugar for:

  c = a; a = b; b = c

Whether it's "cutesy" or  "scales well" is kind of immaterial, as far as
I'm concerned.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Amazon.com interview candidate: "When C++ is your hammer, everything starts
to look like your thumb."