That's exactly my point. It's confusing enough that someone e made a bullshit claim that was totally wrong and confused noobs for years. That won't happen with zig.

That won't happen with any sane systems language all the way back to Algol dialects.

The only thing that C has taken from Algol, was structured control and data.

What about this do you find disagreeable? http://c-faq.com/decl/spiral.anderson.html

The spiral rule works if "pointer to" and "function returning"/"array of" alternate but it breaks if they don't, i.e., if you have arrays of arrays or pointers to pointers.

    int** arr1_of_arr2_of_arr3_of_ptr_to_ptr_to_int[1][2][3]

In this case, spiraling between [1], ×, [2], ×, [3], int is obviously wrong, the correct reading order is [1], [2], [3], ×, ×, int. (Edit: read × = *)

The Right-Left Rule is quoted less frequently on HN but it's a correct algorithm for deciphering C types: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ricko/rt_lt.rule.html

I would name that algorithm "inside-out" instead of "right-left" if my understanding of its behavior is correct.

Aren't you supposed to treat multiple array or pointers as a group?

The fact that it's wrong if you try to generalize it beyond the examples given?

Does it? Here's one that I grabbed from cdecl.org:

  char * const (*(* const bar)[5])(int )

And its translation:

  declare bar as const pointer to array 5 of pointer to function (int) returning const pointer to char

This seems like what I'd get from the spiral technique.