Convention for pointer *

Out of curiosity;开发者_运维百科 why is convention for pointers in C languages like this:

NSString *str = ...

Wouldn't be more appropriate to write:

NSString* str = ...

because we are defining pointer to NSString? (in Objective-C methods we do have (NSString*)parameter1 convention)

Again - I'm asking out of curiosity and to be able to better understand logic behind this... I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel or start flame war.

If you declare multiple pointer variables in a single declaration, you must write

char *a, *b;

since the declaration

char* a, b;

would declare a as a char pointer, but b as a plain char. IOW, this spacing shows that the asterisk really binds to the name only where it appears.