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Comment by jug | Hacker News Reader

The worst thing with C pointers was for me that the asterisk is inexplicably used both to declare a pointer and a COMPLETELY different operation of dereferencing a pointer.

I still don't understand this decision. I think it should've been like int^ p = &i; ... or ... int i = *p;

Everything clicked ironically when I went even deeper and studied assembly language. Then following pointers to data vs just reading pointers becomes very clear and explicit.

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> I still don't understand this decision.

Variable declaration `T v;` means "declare `v` such that expression `v` has type `T`". Variable declaration `T *p` means declare `p` such that the expression `*p` has type `T`". etc.

Nice explanation!

> asterisk is inexplicably used both to declare a pointer and a COMPLETELY different operation of dereferencing a pointer.

This is the most confusing concept of pointers. I feel this could have been easily avoided with different character like ~ or ^ or other.

Why? In C all the declarations work like that:

    float * (*foo(int *)) (int);

foo is something, that can be called with an 'int *', which results in a pointer to something that can be called with an 'int', which results in something which can be dereferenced, which is a float.

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