Measuring syntactic sugar usage in programming languages: An empirical study of c# and java projects

Donghoon Kim, Gangman Yi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Syntactic sugar is introduced to existing programming languages to improve their readability and brevity. There have been many debates about pros and cons of using syntactic sugar. However, it is now an integral part of programming languages. No existing work studies the usage of syntactic sugar in real-world software development. In order to fill this gap, we conducted the first empirical study to examine the usage of syntactic sugar in 20 open source software projects written in either Java or C#. Our study results show that syntactic sugar is generally used more than an corresponding feature in the wild, but there may be a limit to what syntactic sugar cannot replace an corresponding feature completely. In this paper, we make several suggestions as to why this occurs.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvanced in Computer Science and Its Applications, CSA 2013
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages279-284
Number of pages6
ISBN (Print)9783642416736
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event5th FTRA International Conference on Computer Science and its Applications, CSA 2013 - Danang, Viet Nam
Duration: 18 Dec 201321 Dec 2013

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Electrical Engineering
Volume279 LNEE
ISSN (Print)1876-1100
ISSN (Electronic)1876-1119

Conference

Conference5th FTRA International Conference on Computer Science and its Applications, CSA 2013
Country/TerritoryViet Nam
CityDanang
Period18/12/1321/12/13

Keywords

  • C#
  • Java
  • empirical study
  • static analysis
  • syntactic sugar

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