Talk:Syntactic sugar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Contents |
[edit] Syntactic aspartame
The term ¨Syntactic aspartame¨ has been thrown around lately whilst discussing pugs. Anyone care to enlarge the current article? elpincha 19:30, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
Suggest we merge 'Syntactic saccharin' and 'Syntactic Splenda' sections into one, and include this variant in the text. Twifkak 02:49, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] rewrite needed
The last paragraph (Splenda) needs rewriting.
[edit] Mediawiki example
I removed this:
"A Mediawiki example would be the ability of signing one's comments in talk pages with --~~~~. The users could manually insert the Wiki code that this is short for, but the syntactic sugar makes it easier."
It's hard to argue that "~~~~" is sugar; it's more like a macro. Especially for the default expansion, it is not simply the case that users could manually insert the "equivalent" code, because this requires them to know their IP address (at least for anonymous users) and the time at the Mediawiki servers in UTC. It's comparable to macros like __LINE__ in C, expanding to the current line number: you could conceivably go through the trouble of finding the expansion out yourself, but that doesn't make the construct syntactic sugar.
As an aside, how notable are the "syntactic foo" variants people have come up with? "Syntactic sugar" and "syntactic salt" are in common use, but the others look like obscure, one-off expressions to me. Not every clever variation people think of should make it into an encyclopedia. 194.151.6.70 22:20, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Variants
As an aside, how notable are the "syntactic foo" variants people have come up with? "Syntactic sugar" and "syntactic salt" are in common use, but the others look like obscure, one-off expressions to me. Not every clever variation people think of should make it into an encyclopedia.
I agree with this. A DHH blog post is not a reasonable source for an encyclopedia. I've removed that one, others are welcome to put it back or remove others they know to be 'one off' terms. 24.52.132.106 22:45, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
