It wasn't my intention to be inflammatory and I don't consider myself a zealot. My comment has generated a lot of interesting discussion and that's a good thing

It wasn't my intention to be inflammatory and I don't consider myself a zealot. My comment has generated a lot of interesting discussion and that's a good thing, and probably worth the down votes. I wrote C for a long time before I ever even heard of the spiral rule. I do think that the "declaration follows usage" idea worked a lot better before C declarations became so complex. I'm not claiming that the C declaration syntax is wonderful, it isn't. I just think that the C++ style of pretending that int* is a pointer type is misleading, since that's not really what's happening grammatically. Yes, * is a type token, as you say, but it modifies the identifier, not the type specifier. But since the style now is to only declare one variable per declaration, and to always initialize it, then in practice it isn't actually all that confusing. I have always wanted to write a compiler and I'm sure I would get a new perspective on these matters if I did. Go has done a lot to clean up C's messes. I haven't used it much, but I'd like to know it better.