Comment by teo_zero

Yes, it's a pity that some symbols have been overloaded with multiple meanings and the syntax can't disambiguate them. This case would not exist if another symbol had been chosen for dereference.

A similar claim, equally not related to type declarations, is with & that serves two roles as a boolean operator and address-of, that makes (foo)&bar ambiguous.

The list of C symbols that have been badly chosen at the beginning and now it's too late to correct continues with && for logical and, that prevents masking an address-of without adding spaces or parentheses in ``mask & &var``, /* for comments, that prevents dividing by a dereferenced value without adding spaces or parentheses in ``*a / *b``, the pre-increment ``--`` that is indistinguishable from a double application of the unary minus, and the original =+ etc. that have been later changed to += etc.