The problems caused by "*" in C/C++ declarations and also in expressions are caused mostly by the mistake that "*" is a prefix operator instead of being a postfix operator.

This mistake has already been recognized by Dennis Ritchie a very long time ago, but it could not be corrected as it would break backward compatibility.

In 1965, the language EULER by Niklaus Wirth & H. Weber was the first high-level language with explicit pointer variables (previous languages, e.g. LISP I, FORTRAN IV and CPL used pointers only implicitly) and with the 2 operators "address-of" and indirect addressing, the ancestors of C "&" and "*".

However in EULER the indirection operator was postfix, as it should be. Niklaus Wirth kept this operator as postfix in his later languages, e.g. in Pascal.

With a postfix indirection operator, when you write some element of a hierarchical organization of data, which can include an arbitrary number of the 3 operations, array indexing, structure/class member selection and pointer indirection, all the operations are written and executed from the left to the right, without any parentheses and without any ambiguities. (also the C operator taken from PL/I, "->", is no longer needed, as it has no advantage over writing "*.").

This simple change would have avoided most pitfalls of the C declarations.