syntactic salt: n. 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.