Editing Syntactic sugar (section)

== Origins ==
The term ''syntactic sugar'' was coined by [[Peter J. Landin]] in 1964 to describe the surface syntax of a simple [[ALGOL]]-like programming language which was defined semantically in terms of the applicative expressions of [[lambda calculus]],<ref>{{cite journal |last=Landin |first=Peter J. |date=1964 |title=The mechanical evaluation of expressions |url=https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin64.pdf |journal= The Computer Journal|publisher=[[Computer Journal]] |volume=6 |issue=4 |pages=308–320 |doi=10.1093/comjnl/6.4.308 |access-date=21 July 2014|doi-access=free }}</ref>{{sfn|Abelson|Sussman|1996|loc=Chapter 1, [http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-10.html#footnote_Temp_17 footnote 11]}}<!-- reference credits coinage to Landin, hence included --> centered on lexically replacing λ with "where".

Later programming languages, such as [[CLU (programming language)|CLU]], [[ML (programming language)|ML]] and [[Scheme (programming language)|Scheme]], extended the term to refer to syntax within a language which could be defined in terms of a language core of essential constructs; the convenient, higher-level features could be "desugared" and decomposed into that subset.<ref>Barbara Liskov, "A History of CLU", MIT Laboratory for Computer Science Technical Report 561 (1993)</ref> This is, in fact, the usual mathematical practice of building up from primitives.

Building on Landin's distinction between essential language constructs and syntactic sugar, in 1991, [[Matthias Felleisen]] proposed a codification of "expressive power" to align with "widely held beliefs" in the literature. He defined "more expressive" to mean that without the language constructs in question, a program would have to be completely reorganized.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Felleisen|first=Matthias|date=December 1991|title=On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages|url=http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/Publications/Scheme/scp91-felleisen.ps.gz|journal=Science of Computer Programming|publisher=Springer-Verlag|volume=17|issue=1–3|pages=35–75|doi=10.1016/0167-6423(91)90036-W|access-date=19 July 2014|doi-access=free}}</ref>