Ted’s C# 3.0 Overview

Ted Neward has a great post analyzing new C# 3.0 features.

Ted refers to the language enhancements as mostly “syntactic sugar”. In other words - the syntax additions don’t change the expressiveness of C#, but merely add conveniences and shortcuts. We write less code while the C# compiler generates more IL behind the scenes.

Over the years I’ve been puzzled by the term ‘syntactic sugar’. People generally use the term in a derogatory sense, as in: “C++? Pffft. That’s just C with some syntactic sugar”.

Isn’t every language just syntactic sugar when compared to, say, CPU opcodes?