Comment by 1718627440

> because the '*' is part of the type

I agree with you that this is an obvious mental model and it might be true for other languages, but this isn't the model that the C language has, which reveals in the fact that:

   int* a, b;

does not declare two pointers.

You can see it like this: C does not have a way to declare a variable to be a pointer to int. In C you can only declare an expression with a variable to have the type int.

That's why I don't like this syntax especially for beginners. It is deceiving. It leads to people thinking it works differently than it really does and coming up with weird mental models. For example, that the unary '*'-operator has two meanings: dereference and declaring a pointer. Than they say a pointer should better be denoted by '&', because that's the address-of operator. But that's wrong, unary '*' always means dereference. You don't declare 'a' to have type 'int *', you declare '*a' to have the type 'int'!

It's the same with array syntax (and also with function pointers and really every declaration):

    Java:  int[size] a;

    C:     int a[size];

I agree that it doesn't cause problems for people who are experienced in the declaration rules of C, and it might never cause confusion if you never declare multiple variables in a line (I never do, because of diffability), but when teaching it leads to the wrong user model. Show 'int* a, b;' and people are confused, show 'int *a, b;' and it is obvious how it works.