Comment by bigdict

I never understood the reasoning behind this, is it that "the asterisk is part of the type, so we group it that way"?

That misses the point of the C declaration syntax: you write an expression that when used on its own will recover the basic type. So the asterisk goes with the symbol name, because that's how you dereference a pointer.

Further, it doesn't work if you want to declare more than one pointer like so:

  int* a, b;  /* wrong */
  int *a, *b; /* correct */