The Clockwise/Spiral Rule of C declarations

This has been posted before[1], and the "spiral rule" is a load of hooey. The correct rule is "follow the C grammar". An easier to remember and also correct rule is "start at the identifier being declared; work outwards from that point, reading right until you hit a closing parenthesis, then left until you hit the corresponding open parenthesis, then resume reading right..." (this is sometimes called the "right-left rule"[2]). The "spiral rule" dances around the truth without actually being…

I've always had a bit more luck with the "typedef each step of the construction" rule-of-thumb. Also, I tend to hide anything as complex as "pointer-to-array-of-pointers-to-functions" (even though you memorize this idiom pretty quickly after an hour in the kernel) behind library ADT's, so you're never indexing an array, but rather passing an index and a whatever_t* to whatever_get(w, index).

I link to my old response every time the "spiral rule" comes up. It makes for pretty pictures, but it's nonsense. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5080096

The spiral rule works only if there is no pointer to pointer or array of array in the type. In other words it is an incorrect rule. But take this for example: +----------------------------+ | +-----------------------+ | | | +------------------+ | | | | | +-------------+ | | | | | | | +--------+ | | | | | | | | | +--+ | | | | | | | | | | ^ | | | | | |…