I'm coming from Tcl-world ...

[holger krekel]

Andreas Leitgeb wrote:
> [me]
> > Syntactic sugar is relatively 
> > minimal compared to other languages.
> I don't understand, why "Syntactic sugar" has such a negative 
> connotation in most language-newsgroups. 

If you - like quite some people do - program with lots of
different languages in the scope of - say - five years 
you realize that syntactic sugar usually doesn't cut it. 

You wan't to be able to express ideas and give good names
to them so that you later can maintain it. For me, python
helps a lot here.  

> It's usually syntactic sugar, that makes a language pleasing to
> work with.

up to a certain degree, yes.  E.g. perl certainly goes too far for me.
I professionally worked with perl for two years, day in and out.  
That's just two years ago and i can't remember even basic stuff
due to the high ratio of !`{$[%&/ characters in a line (called
line-noise).  IIRC, TCL was better for me in this area.

cheers,

    holger