Comment by kqr

This reasoning seems to me similar to how declaring a pointer in e.g. C works: many beginners write

    int* a, b;

And think that this constructs two pointers-to-integer. In fact, it constructs one pointer and one plain integer. A better (equivalent) way to write it is

    int *a, b;

You're not declaring variables of type

   int*

You're saying that b is an int and

    *a 

Is an int, where the asterisk means "the dereferenced a"!