The opposite of
syntactic sugar, a feature 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.