Question

Simple question is: why do you write

char *foo;

and not

char* foo;

Let me explain: for me (coming from Java) a declaration is something like

<variable-type> <variable-name>;

In the above case I declare a variable named foo of type char* (as it is a pointer pointing to char). But wherever I read c/c++/c#-Code it looks like a variable named *foo of type char. The compiler does not care about whitespaces but I as a developer do.

tl;dr What I ask for is a good explanation for writing char *foo instead of char* foo (what, as explained, seems more convenient for me).

Answer 1

Think of the following declaration:

char *p, c;

This declares a pointer to char called p and a character variable called c. This shows that it isn’t exactly correct to think of variable declaration as having the simple and clear format you described.