[keithwarren]

The point of the article was the fact there is a functional difference in how the runtime/code behaves in this instance.

Syntactic sugar would be something like automatic property getters and setters in C#; they just shorten the syntax drastically and the compiler or runtime unroll your code to the traditional implementation.

In this case you can interrogate things normally bound up into the exception instance itself, like the message without having to hit the catch block to wait for it to be hydrated. Once you enter that catch block things happen in the runtime that are costly so avoiding that if possible is the best route.