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From: Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Is this safe?
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2023 08:32:57 -0800
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Andrey Tarasevich <andreytarasevich@hotmail.com> writes:

> On 02/21/23 6:12 AM, Alf P. Steinbach wrote:
>
>> Not what you're asking, but the common convention in C++ is to
>> separate the type specification from the variable, i.e. `auto& c`
>> not `auto &c`.
>>
>> But on the third and gripping hand, in this case I'd write `char&
>> c`, since there's no advantage in `auto` here and it obscures
>> things.
>
> Not really.  This is a misleading "convention" that has no reason to
> exist.  In this case the `&` is a part of an individual declarator,
> not a part of decl-specifier-seq.  There's no reason to group the
> syntactic elements differently.  It achieves nothing.

I would say it achieves less than nothing, because it's misleading.
It's like writing a+b * c ;  the grouping suggested by the spacing
doesn't match the actual precedence.  In almost all cases it's a
mistake to use "contra-syntactic" spacing, and attaching '&' or '*'
to a type specifier is definitely one of those mistakes.