It's a pretty bad syntax. A demonstration of a declaration statement where the asterisk operator binds to an identifier rather than to a type: int my_int,

It's a pretty bad syntax. A demonstration of a declaration statement where the asterisk operator binds to an identifier rather than to a type: int my_int, *my_ptr, my_other_int; A demonstration of a different declaration where the asterisk operator does not bind to an identifier, as an identifier isn't even needed: extern void my_function(int*, char*); So the real answer is that it depends on what you're doing. Terribly clunky. Interestingly the D programming language mostly keeps C's syntax, but handles multiple declarations differently. https://dlang.org/spec/declaration.html#declaration_syntax https://dlang.org/spec/declaration.html#declaration_syntax