Every time I have to deal with the declarator syntax in C or C++, I can't help but ponder what K&R were thinking when they designed this. It's not like there weren't other languages back then with a saner approach.

It looks like what they did was take the syntax from B:

    auto x[10];

and generalize it such that the type name ended up before the variable name, as in Algol. But in B this worked much better, because it didn't have array types (or pointer types, or function types) - everything was a machine word. So [] in a variable declaration was just to allocate memory to which the variable would refer; the variable itself would still be a word. When they made [] part of the type, and added pointers and function types, the result was a mess.