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There is an other.

int * p;

Here is an otter
- :)
- Male otters kidnap children otters and hold them for ransom until the mum gives them food.
I’ve seen that in style guides ”because it should piss of everyone equally”.

Having an asterisk both be the type indicator and the dereference operator is one of the great programming language design blunders of our time, along with allowing nulls for any type in so many languages.

I also sometimes wish that the syntax in if statements was inverted, where () was optional and {} was required.
- Rust makes this choice and it is way better.
- Based
- Can you give me an example? I'm not sure I follow. Might be language specific?
Having assignments return a value is right up there as well.
- Because of the possibility of accidentally performing an assignment in a conditional expression?
  If yes, I agree that it's not great.

The fact it's a pointer is part of the type, not part of the variable name. So int* p is the way.

You would think so, but int* a, b is actually eqivalent to int* a; int b, so the asterisk actually does go with the name. Writing int* a, *b is inconsistent, so int *a, *b is the way to go.
- Yeah, and I'd say that's a design flaw of the language as it is unintuitive behaviour.
- When people say “pointers are hard”, they mean “I have no idea where the star goes and now an ampersand is also implicated”.
- While technically true, that's also one of the worst 'features' of the language and I personally consider it a bug in the language. Use two lines and make it clear and correct.
- Don't declare more than 1 pointer per line. This resolves that, badly.
- Alright, I'll never, ever write something this way now. Good to know.
- This is true in C, but not in D.
Then again, at least in C, the mantra is "declaration follows usage". Surely you don't write pointer dereferences as * ptr? Most likely not, you most likely write it as *ptr. The idea behind the int *ptr; syntax is basically that when you do *ptr, you get an int.
And with this idea, stuff like function pointers (int (*f)(void)), arrays of pointers (int *a[10]) versus pointers of arrays (int (*a)[10]) etc. start making sense. It's certainly not the best way to design the syntax, and I'm as much a fan of the Pascal-styled "type follows the identifier" syntax (e.g. let x: number;) as anyone, but the C way does have a rhyme and a reason for the way it is.
int* i, j
The C syntax is just messed up.
It's part of the type yet it's also a unique identifier. That's the whole thing with east or west const. const int * is a ~~immutable~~ mutable pointer that points to ~~mutable~~ immutable memory. int *const is a ~~mutable~~ immutable pointer that points to ~~immutable~~ memory. int const * is the same type as the first example, a ~~immutable~~ mutable pointer that points to ~~mutable~~ immutable memory.
Same stuff applies to references which makes it easier to think of the variable owning the * or & as if you want that pointer or reference to be const it has to go after.
Edit:I am a moron who managed to get it exactly backwards :|
- Found the guy that can probably do function pointers!
- I think you've got it backwards. I learned to read pointer decls from right-to-left, so const int * is a (mutable) pointer to an int which is const while int *const is a const pointer to a (mutable) int.
- I always read it right to left and it seems to make sense to me.
I do this in my code because it looks better and makes more sense...until I decide to declare 2 vars on one line and then I use the very cursed int* a, *b
- I just wouldn't do that.
tbh I always think about it as 'p' is a pointer to int
therefore *p is an int
therefore I should call it int *p;
however, of course, you should use what your team prefers. Having good yet inconsistent style is worst than mid consistent style.
I don't code much C++, but then I'd lose alignment with: x = *p; and I feel that would bug me.
I'm looking at Google Style Guide for my next project and it says either is fine, just don't declare more than one per line.
And yet the default clang formatter gets it wrong.

std::shared_ptr p;

I'm just a c# dev wishing to fuck we had something visual to indicate reference types so my coworkers could stop misusing them

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76975645/how-can-i-give-different-colors-for-class-enum-and-interface-names-identifiers might get you closer?
- oh thank you! I use jetbrains but I wonder if I can implement the same thing
It's such a short list of value types though. How can they have that much trouble? All of the various ints and floats, bool, char, structs, and enums. Everything else is reference.

Wait until I tell y'all about const.

no int * ptr fans here?

Int *p is unreadable, unreasonable, and bad programming.

But C syntax clearly hints to int *p being the expected format.
Otherwise you would only need to do int* p, q to declare two pointers... however doing that only declares p as pointer. You are actually required to type * in front of each variable name intended to hold a pointer in the declaration: int *p, *q;
- That's because C was designed by a fool.
Why so? It’s what it actually is