My thoughts exactly. Actually, I'd go as far as to say that using the same character for both the type declaration of pointers and the operator for dereferencin

My thoughts exactly. Actually, I'd go as far as to say that using the same character for both the type declaration of pointers and the operator for dereferencing pointers was a mistake in the first place. Imagine they'd have used this instead, for example: int. a; // declares a pointer to an int named a *a = 42; // dereference the pointer Yea, looks weird on first sight (because we're used to current style), but the difference is glaringly obvious: it's visually apparent that the two do completely different things. It doesn't need to be the dot, by the way. My point is that any symbol that's different would have been better than using the same one.