Question

Wikipedia claims that the [] operator precedes the * operator in evaluation.

Then, why does the following statement:

char *a[3];

declare an array of 3 character pointers, rather than a pointer to an array of 3 characters as per the operator precedence?

Answer 1

Because, as Wikipedia says, [] has higher precedence than *?

Processing the declaration, the a[3] is processed as ‘array of 3’ before you process the *.

To declare a pointer to an array of three characters, you have to use parentheses to override the default precedence:

char (*a)[3];

Now the parentheses take precedence over the array.