Syntactic sugar vs. feature

Question

In C# (and Java) a string is little more than a char array with a stored length and a few methods tacked on. Likewise, (reference vs. value stuff aside) objects are little more than glorified structs with inheritance and interfaces added.

On one level, these additions feel like clear features and enhancements unto themselves. On another level, they feel like a marginal upgrade from the status of "syntactic sugar."

To take this idea further, consider (I may have some details wrong, but the point remains):

transistor
elementary logic gate
compound gate
  |         |
 ALU    flip-flop
   |    |       |
   | register  RAM
   | |
   CPU
   microcode
   assembly
   C
   C++
   | |
MSIL JavaScript
C#   jQuery

Many times, any single layer of abstraction looks a lot like syntactic sugar but multiple layers of separation feel very removed from each other.

How do you know when something has stopped being syntactic sugar and started being a bona fide feature?

Answer 1

It turns out to be a feature instead of syntactic sugar when it implies a different way of thinking.

You are right when you say objects are in fact glorified structs with methods and inheritance. That, however, is just the implementation detail. What objects allow is to think in a different way. You can relate more easily to real world entities when thinking about objects. The same thing happened when even further back in time, we jumped from using go-to's to procedural programming. Under the hood, the processor still keeps on jmp'ing from OP to OP, but we could think in a different, more black-box, way.

Having said that, in extreme, you can say everything is syntactic sugar, but some of that sugar is a feature when it allows you to think differently.