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From: Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: on understanding & and pointer arithmetic
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2021 12:44:43 -0800
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Meredith Montgomery <mmontgomery@levado.to> writes:
[...]
> Thanks for the correction.  I'll repeat what you say in my words just to
> get a chance that you might verify what I'm saying.  When I have an
> array such as 
>
>   char a[] = "hello, world"
>
> which occupies 13 bytes, then a pointer to it is a pointer of type
>
>   char (*a)[13]
>
> and that's how we write its type --- although I could omit the letter a
> there, perhaps I should, I also think it's okay to write it there.  Bart
> effectively wrote (char*)[], which is not the same or perhaps not a
> valid type at all.  That's my understanding now.
[...]

The name "a" is not something you can arbitrarily decide to include or
omit.

`char (*)[13]` is a type name (pointer to array of 13 chars).

`char (*a)[13];` not a type name.  It's a declaration.  It declares an
object named `a` of type `char (*)[13]`.  (And it needs that trailing
semicolon.)

-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
Working, but not speaking, for Philips
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */