> Sugar obviously does not require some automatic language translation What makes you say that? I would say it's crucial. Syntactic sugar is anything where we

> Sugar obviously does not require some automatic language translation What makes you say that? I would say it's crucial. Syntactic sugar is anything where we can say "Code of the form 'foo x y z...' is defined as 'bar x y z...'" where both forms are valid in the same language. Such a definition, by its very nature, gives us an automatic translation (look for anything of the first form, replace it with the second). > It just means that in all cases a human can rewrite it without the new syntax and get the same semantics. Yet that's so general as to be worthless. I'm a human and I've rewritten Java programs in PHP, but that doesn't make Java "syntactic sugar" for PHP.