[eMSF]

Well, obviously it doesn't have parentheses. It's not like this is the only instance where adding parentheses affects the end result.

You could write even more complex declarators (but don't have to), but that would not prove that some other syntax is inherently intuitive. Case in point, I cannot parse the Go syntax as I do not know Go.

In my experience pointers to arrays are rather uncommon and I'm not sure that I've ever written a function returning one, having even less of a need for a pointer to such. (Thus out of all these, only your first example is somewhat common in practice.)

[lifthrasiir]

> I cannot parse the Go syntax as I do not know Go.

Or you probably never even tried. You should be immediately able to parse it if I provide a hint that `*`, `&` and `[10]` mean roughly the same thing as C, because `*[10]int` has no reasonable reason to be parsed as an array of 10 copies of something. You can't do so in C.

[rramadass]

Right. These are just "old chestnuts" used to scare C noobs particularly in interviews. IIRC the K&R C book itself had a example program to convert C declarations to English and also there exists a utility program called "cdecl" to do the same.

[lifthrasiir]

Better to use that English explanation as a model of readable syntax.