Phlip wrote:
> Please reserve the term "syntactic sugar" for cutesy systems that don't 
> provide for lean and incredibly expressive statements that scale very well!
>   


I have a nagging suspicion that Matz himself has used this term. It is 
certainly not a derogatory term when used within the Ruby community and 
I have a feeling that it is not a derogatory term anywhere else either. 
It is simply a description of a feature of a language. Many languages 
have syntactic sugar, heck arrays in C are syntactic sugar. The line "a 
+= 12" is syntactic sugar for "a = a + 12", Ruby has benefited greatly 
from "syntactic sugar" (as have many other languages), just imaging the 
outcry that there would be if it was all stripped from the language. 
Image how much slower the language would have taken up if we had to 
enter all our code in long form. There is enough kvetching from C/C++ 
and Java programmer about the lack of pre and post ++/-- operators to 
show how important syntactic sugar is to people.

Let us not disrespect our heritage even if it is not very "Enterprisey".