C style declarations, quickly get difficult to figure out. This website, shows the "clockwise spiral rule" to help ease that problem.
http://c-faq.com/decl/spiral.anderson.html
This is just one example, showing the problem:
Example #2: Pointer to Function declaration
+--------------------+
| +---+ |
| |+-+| |
| |^ || |
char *(*fp)( int, float *);
^ ^ ^ || |
| | +--+| |
| +-----+ |
+------------------------+
Question we ask ourselves: What is fp?
``fp is a...
* Moving in a spiral clockwise direction, the first thing we see is a `)'; therefore, fp is inside parenthesis, so we continue the spiral inside the parenthesis and the next character seen is the `*', so...
``fp is a pointer to...
* We are now out of the parenthesis and continuing in a spiral clockwise direction, we see the `('; therefore, we have a function, so...
``fp is a pointer to a function passing an int and a pointer to float returning...
* Continuing in a spiral fashion, we then see the `*' character, so...
``fp is a pointer to a function passing an int and a pointer to float returning a pointer to...
* Continuing in a spiral fashion we see the `;', but we haven't visited all tokens, so we continue and finally get to the type `char', so...
``fp is a pointer to a function passing an int and a pointer to float returning a pointer to a char'' 
I am SO glad that the Go language I'm studying atm, has their declarations read ONLY from left to right! This clockwise spiral methodology quickly becomes bizarre once you move beyond simple declarations.
Aug 3rd, 2011, 8:15 AM
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