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Comment by clishem | Hacker News Reader

What if I told you that even declarations like

    char const *(* const (*(*ip)())[])[]

are trivial to read? [Read this](http://www.icce.rug.nl/documents/cplusplus/cplusplus03.html#...) and you'll never struggle with any declaration ever again.

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"Unambiguous" is not the same as "trivial". C code generally reads left to right, so a trivial syntax for declaring, say, an array of const pointers to functions that take a const pointer to a char and return a const pointer to a char, would have tokens for those things in that order.

C code generally reads left to right

No it doesn't:

    p += k[foo(bar, baz, 3*(quux+1))] << 32-m[++i];

I know the rules, and how to apply them. But they are not trivial. The fact that such documents need to be written in the first place, and the fact that utilities like cdecl exist, is a strong testimony to that.

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