Placement of the asterisk in pointer declarations

Question

I\'ve recently decided that I just have to finally learn C/C++, and there is one thing I do not really understand about pointers or more precisely, their definition.

Answer 1

The rationale in C is that you declare the variables the way you use them. For example

char *a[100];

says that *a[42] will be a char. And a[42] a char pointer. And thus a is an array of char pointers.

This because the original compiler writers wanted to use the same parser for expressions and declarations. (Not a very sensible reason for a langage design choice)