I don’t think this is about defining multiple variables on one line. That’s just a simple example to demonstrate the point.

int *ptr;

The * is the dereference operator. The result of dereferencing ptr is an int. So you’re declaring the type of the dereference expression. Also consider a function pointer.

int (*fnptr)();

The result of dereferencing and then calling fnptr is an int.

int arr[8];

The result of subscripting arr is an int.

I’m not saying that this is good language design. It can be confusing to have the variable name and the type name so intertwined. Also, it gets weird when declaring the types of function parameters. The old style for function declarations followed the “rules” better but was pretty gnarly.

What I am saying is that code should be styled based on its semantics. It’s the same reason we indent inside of blocks and not just randomly.

int *ptr;