Declaring pointers; asterisk on the left or right of the space between the type and name?

Posted by GenTiradentes on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by GenTiradentes
Published on 2010-04-18T00:37:37Z Indexed on 2010/04/18 0:43 UTC
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I've seen mixed versions of this in a lot of code. (This applies to C and C++, by the way.) People seem to declare pointers in one of two ways, and I have no idea which one is correct, of if it even matters.

The first way it to put the asterisk adjacent the type name, like so:

someType* somePtr;

The second way is to put the asterisk adjacent the name of the variable, like so:

someType *somePtr;

This has been driving me nuts for some time now. Is there any standard way of declaring pointers? Does it even matter how pointers are declared? I've used both declarations before, and I know that the compiler doesn't care which way it is. However, the fact that I've seen pointers declared in two different ways leads me to believe that there's a reason behind it. I'm curious if either method is more readable or logical in some way that I'm missing.

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