The best argument against this, and for leaving the * by the variable name, is this declaration:
char* a, b;
Now a has type char * but b is just char. It’s probably not what the author meant and it’s definitely ambiguous even if it was intentional. Better to write:
char b, *a;
Or, if you meant it this way:
char *a, *b;
“Well, don’t declare multiple variables on the same line,” you respond. Sure, that’s good advice too. But in mixed, undisciplined, or just old code, it’s an easy trap to fall into.
apply the char* type to both? (That is, why didn't they design it that way?)
I assume there was some reason originally, but it's made everything a bit more confusing ever since for a lot of people. :/
Edit: Apparently it's so declaration mirrors use. Not a good enough reason IMO. But plenty of languages have warts and bad choices that get brought forth. I'm a Perl dev, so I speak from experience (even if I think it's not nearly as bad as most people make out).
In the olden days of C, pointers were not considered types on their own (you cannot have just a pointer, a pointer must point ‘to’ something, grammatically speaking). The type of the object of that declaration is a char. So it’s not really read as ‘I’m declaring a char-pointer called a’, it’s more along the lines of ‘I’m declaring an unnamed char, which will be accessed when one dereferences a’. Hence the * for dereferencing.
