12 May
2017
12 May
'17
3:49 a.m.
Bjarne agrees with you. He put the * (and the &) with the type name to emphasize it
is part of the type.
This works fine as long as you only use one declaration per statement.
The problem with that is that * doesn't really bind to the type name. It binds to
the variable.
char* cp1, cp2; // cp1 is pointer to char, cp2 is just a char.
I always found it confusing that the * is used to indicate an pointer here, where as when
you want to change an lvalue to a pointer, you use &.
But if we're going to gripe about the evolution of C. My biggest gripe is when they
fixed structs to be real types, they didn't also do so for arrays.
Arrays and their degeneration to poitners is one of the biggest annoyances in C.
Am I the only one here who thinks that e.g. a char
pointer should be
"char* cp1, cp2" instead of "char *cp1, *cp2"? I.e. the fundamental
type is "char*", not "char", and to this day I still write: