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.