> You read strictly left to right That wouldn't play well with pointers to arrays and pointers to functions: int (*pa)[X]; // int(*)[X] pa; int (*fp)(

> You read strictly left to right That wouldn't play well with pointers to arrays and pointers to functions: int (*pa)[X]; // int(*)[X] pa; int (*fp)(void); // int(*)(void) fp; Here is how I designed the type declaration syntax in my own language, Quaint (https://github.com/bbu/quaint-lang https://github.com/bbu/quaint-lang): pa: ptr(int[3]); // int (*pa)[3] fp: fptr(): int; // int (*fp)(void) arr: int[5]; // int arr[5] p: ptr(int); // int *p pp: ptr(ptr(int)); // int **pp arrp: ptr[5](int); // int *p[5] You basically have the identifier first, and then a recursive expression which uses mostly function-call-like expressions in order to nest recursive types.