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Comment by hkt | Hacker News Reader

Syntactic sugar is a phrase permanently marred for me by the ruby community: it means "cognitive load for other people who know the language but don't keep up with the faddy bits". It made me tremendously sad.

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Yeah, but C-style "for" loops are nice, right ? Still, they really are a syntactic sugar for a "while".

The problem is more with a language having fady bits and people using them when they don't make the code clearer, than with syntactic sugar.

Sure, I agree actually - if you are going to have a language that has lots of nice syntax, _let it be built in from the start_. Or only released at major increments, etc etc.

Hopefully Bash 6.0 then

C-style "for" loops are nice, right

Well... I know macros are supposed to be bad, but.. I've been programming in C for a long time, but only recently tried 'sugaring' my loops with

  #define _(x,y) for (x=0;x<(y);x++)

..which has worked soo well, I'm sticking with it. It makes programming in C much more pleasurable. (My programs mostly have a lot of nested loops over multidimensional arrays, mostly from 0, inc'ed by 1)

So now instead of e.g.

  for (i=0;i<WID;i++) 
    for (j=0;j<HEI;j++) {

it's just

  _(i,WID) _(j,HEI) {

which makes me smile every time.

Nicely put.

I'm reminded of the Jargon file that says "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon."

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