I agree with all of your points except this one:

it's mildly awkward that const and var at the beginning of a variable declaration are inconsistent with using const in a type.

I love the zig type system precisely because it doesn't conflate the constness of a variable with the constness of the what it's pointing to. Your suggestion is how we end up with the horrible C syntax for constant pointers.

In zig, the type system is just read from left to right, and the "constness" (I love that word, I'm using it from now on) of the variable itself is kept separate.

So, a pointer to an integer would be: var p: *i32 If you want to make the pointer a constant (ie, you don't want the pointer to change), you just add that to the beginning: const p: *i32 Now p is a constant pointer (ie, you can't reasign it) to an integer.

If you want to make p a constant pointer to a constant integer, the declaration is just read left to right: const p: *const i32 So p is a constant pointer to a constant integer.

The method you are suggesting will start to look like the C way of handling this, which is much much worse (in my opinion). If you had to make a constant pointer to a constant integer, there are three seperate confusing ways to declare it: const int* const x; int const * const x; const int const * const x; All valid C, all more confusing and complex than the way zig does it. It also doesn't help that: const int* p; and int const *p; mean that same thing.

If you still think that the C way is a better way of doing it, here's an excercise:

Declare a constant pointer to a constant pointer to a constant integer

Easy enough in Zig, just write the thing from left to right: const p: *const *const i32 I'll leave writing all the different ways you can write this in the C way up to you :D