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syntactic salt

   designed to make it harder to write bad code.  Specifically,
   syntactic salt is a hoop the programmer must jump through just to
   prove that he knows what's going on, rather than to express a
   program action.  Some programmers consider required type
   declarations to be syntactic salt.  A requirement to write
   `end if', `end while', `end do', etc. to terminate
   the last block controlled by a control construct (as opposed to
   just `end') would definitely be syntactic salt.  Syntactic salt
   is like the real thing in that it tends to raise hackers' blood
   pressures in an unhealthy way.  Compare candygrammar.  .