> I do actually think about this sort of thing quite a bit
Forgive me for being abrasive above.
> I’m firmly of the belief that C style type syntax is never going to not be confusing
Yeah, C is going to stay C. No fixing that. The bummer is when new languages repeat the problem because they don't understand what causes it.
> Personally I think a core problem is that declaration and use are different
I claim that declaration and use can be the same. In all cases, you read the affixes for arrays, pointers, function calls, and struct/union fields from left to right.
// declarations
int i
int a[10]
int f(int arg)[10] { ... }
int p@
// usage
print i
print a[1]
print f(1)[1]
print p@
> I’m not sure how I would declare the type of a function that returns a pointer to an array
// function, pointer, array
int f()@[10] ...
When reading your examples I found myself having to constantly second guess the precedence of arrays and pointers, and I’m not sure how I would declare the type of a function that returns a pointer to an array, or an array of pointers. I’m happy to accept the extra noise of let because it reduces the overall time needed to understand what code means, and we end up reading code so much more than we write it.