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Advances in Computer Science and its Applications pp 279–284Cite as

Measuring Syntactic Sugar Usage in Programming Languages: An Empirical Study of C# and Java Projects

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering ((LNEE,volume 279))

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.

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References

  1. Foreach, in Visual Studio .NET (2003), http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ttw7t8t6v=vs.71.aspx

  2. Foreach loop, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreach_loop

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Donghoon Kim

  2. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Gangneung-Wonju National University, Wonju, South Korea

    Gangman Yi

Authors
  1. Donghoon Kim
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  2. Gangman Yi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Donghoon Kim .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Humanitas College, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea, Republic of (South Korea)

    Hwa Young Jeong

  2. Computer Science & Software Engineering, Monmouth University, W. Long Branch, New Jersey, USA

    Mohammad S. Obaidat

  3. School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of Aizu, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Fukushima, Japan

    Neil Y. Yen

  4. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul University of Science & and Technology (SeoulTech), Seoul, Korea, Republic of (South Korea)

    James J. (Jong Hyuk) Park

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© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Cite this paper

Kim, D., Yi, G. (2014). Measuring Syntactic Sugar Usage in Programming Languages: An Empirical Study of C# and Java Projects. In: Jeong, H., S. Obaidat, M., Yen, N., Park, J. (eds) Advances in Computer Science and its Applications. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 279. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41674-3_40

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41674-3_40

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-41673-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-41674-3

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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