I was just thinking about pointer syntax today, and if you ask me, there are a lot of problems that could be avoided if language designers took a page out of Guido van Rossum's book and extend his idea of forced spacing.

Take the first example you've given, and let's just talk about variable declaration:

    int* a;
    int * a;
    int *a;

That's all the same. That's wrong. Obviously, you can write a lexer and parser that doesn't give a crap, but the human mind does. If you think it doesn't, that's only because you've internalized the various cases.

It should be this:

    int* a;

The type we're talking about is a pointer to a variable of type int: in other words, "a" is an int-pointer. If you were to create a macro, you'd do something like this:

    #define int_ptr int*

Do you see what I'm getting at? The star in this case is a suffix, equivalent (in our minds) to "_ptr". Conceptually, it doesn't belong anywhere else than attached to the type. It's a compound type, conceptually.

Now, take the star being used in a different context:

    int b = 10;
    int* a = &b;
    printf("%d\n", *a);

There, though we see the same character, it's a completely different thing. It's a dereference operator. Conceptually, it belongs attached to the pointer variable it is dereferencing; and since the star is already used in one context as a suffix, here it should be used as a prefix.

This is no good:

    printf("%d\n", * a);

It doesn't matter that "this compiles." That's not what this is about.

Many C programmers (and programmers in other languages, even Python) are used to writing things like this:

    int c = x*y;

That's wrong. Sure, the lexer and parser don't care. But that makes the language worse, for the human operator. "But it saves space!" Spare me.

The thing with this one example, using the star, is that what we have is the equivalent of a homonym. We have one sign that is actually three different words. Mandating spacing removes the ambiguity you're complaining about.

C is what it is, but if we imagine someone were going to write it today, they should incorporate the above and mandate spacing. For the sake of the humans. "ident type" is not the only solution.