Syntactic sugar

Common card · No. 340687

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. Syntactic sugar is usually a shorthand for a common operation that could also be expressed in an alternate, more verbose, form: The programmer has a choice of whether to use the shorter form or the longer form, but will usually use the shorter form since it is shorter and easier to type and read. For example, in the Python programming language it is possible to get a list element at a given index using the syntax list_variable.__getitem__(index), but this is frequently shortened to list_variable[index] which could be considered simpler and easier to read, despite having identical behavior. Similarly, list_variable.__setitem__(index, value) is frequently shortened to list_variable[index] = value. A construct...

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