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In computer science, syntactic sugar is syntax within a programming language that is designed to make things easier to read or to express. It makes the language "sweeter" for human use: things can be expressed more clearly, more concisely, or in an alternative style that some may prefer.
Authors often introduce syntactic sugar, such as let, [k] to permit writing the above in the more intuitive order let f = N in M. By chaining such definitions, one can write a lambda calculus "program" as zero or more function definitions, followed by one lambda-term using those functions that constitutes the main body of the program.
Operator overloading is syntactic sugar, and is used because it allows programming using notation nearer to the target domain [1] and allows user-defined types a similar level of syntactic support as types built into a language. It is common, for example, in scientific computing, where it allows computing representations of mathematical objects ...
Informally, and using programming language jargon, a tree (xy) can be thought of as a function x applied to an argument y. When evaluated (i.e., when the function is "applied" to the argument), the tree "returns a value", i.e., transforms into another tree. The "function", "argument" and the "value" are either combinators or binary trees.
Landin is responsible for inventing the stack, environment, control, dump SECD machine, the first abstract machine for a functional programming language, [12] and the ISWIM programming language, defining the Landin off-side rule and for coining the term syntactic sugar.
List comprehension is a syntactic construct available in some programming languages for creating a list based on existing lists. It follows the form of the mathematical set-builder notation (set comprehension) as distinct from the use of map and filter functions.
Operators such as + are syntactic sugar for conventionally named method calls: a + b stands for a.plus(b). The usual arithmetic precedence conventions are used to resolve the calling order of methods in complex formulae.
In the programming language Dylan, which is an object-oriented language that supports multimethods and doesn't have a concept of this, sending a message to an object is still kept in the syntax. The two forms below work in the same way; the differences are just syntactic sugar. object.method(param1, param2) and method (object, param1, param2)