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.