One notable feature of .fetchmailrc syntax is the use of optional noise keywords that are supported simply in order to make the specifications read a bit more like English. The ‘with’ keywords and single occurrence of ‘options’ in the example aren't actually necessary, but they help make the declarations easier to read at a glance.
The traditional term for this sort of thing is syntactic sugar; the maxim that goes with this is a famous quip that “syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon”.[88] Indeed, syntactic sugar needs to be used sparingly lest it obscure more than help.
-- The Art of Unix Programming
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