Re: The meaning of 'sugar' [Forked from Re: Why do we have ipairs?]
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- Subject: Re: The meaning of 'sugar' [Forked from Re: Why do we have ipairs?]
- From: Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>
- Date: 2014年6月11日 12:53:00 -0300
> 'break' doesn't exist without loop structures like "while". To extend the
> metaphor, 'break' becomes fat that accumulates thanks to the existence of
> sugar.
>
> Am I understanding this correctly?
Not exactly. If 'while' were sugar, there would no 'break' either. The
great thing about syntactic sugar is that it does not accumulate fat!
> I believe that I understand and accept the conclusion, but find the
> component of "expressive power" to be critical:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_power
Expressive power does not have a direct connection with syntactic sugar.
(See the paralel discution going on: ++i is sugar for i+=1, in the sense
that in C you can always translate (++(exp)) to ((exp)+=1) no matter what
is 'exp' or where it appears; but the question whether this brings more
"expressive power" to the language is debatable.)
-- Roberto