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.

