The advantage is that you don't introduce any new operators or syntactic forms which would only be used in declarations. This means a smaller set of tokens and

The advantage is that you don't introduce any new operators or syntactic forms which would only be used in declarations. This means a smaller set of tokens and a smaller set of syntactic forms. Being able to parse an expression like (*arr[i])(42) means that you can use pretty much the same machinery to parse int (*arr[SIZE])(int a)