supplementation

> Ever since then I have not been able to figure out why it is commonly taught next to the variable name.

C does this very cute (read: horrifyingly unintuitive) thing where the type reads how it's used. So "char ⋆a" is written so because "⋆a" is a "char", i.e. pointer declarations mimic dereferencing, and similarly, function pointer declarations mimic function application, and array declarations mimic indexing into the array.

Sorry, can you elaborate? I'm skimming through the documentation and I can't find a section on having "the storage type determined at compile time", except for the section on arbitrary-range integers.