The C23 edition of Modern C

Wait, C programmers now put the star on the left hand side?

char* thing; // good

char *thing; // bad

This ... is awesome. As a C++ "native" I've always found the "star on the right" thing to be really horribly confusing.

Ofc this has always been an option. In my C heyday I used to put a space on both sides of the star. It makes for a more consistent syntax when you have multi layer pointers with const at various layers. For example:

// mutable pointer to mutable data:

char * str;

// Immutable pointer to immutable data:

char const*const str;

// Mutable pointer to an immutable pointer to a mutable pointer to immutable data:

char const**const* strs;

Given that putting it on the right reflects the actual syntax tree of the code, why do you find it "horribly confusing"?

I mean, one can reasonably argue that C & C++ declarator syntax is itself horribly confusing because it doesn't read left-to-right. But it is what it is, so why pretend that it's something else?