Re: The meaning of 'sugar' [Forked from Re: Why do we have ipairs?]

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> '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