[paulnechifor]

The "spiral rule" doesn't work all the time. See this previous HN comment by stephencanon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12775862 .

Also this comment by Linus Torvalds (copy pasted because I don't know how to link to Google+ comments):

> I don't think that works. It breaks trivially for consecutive [] or * cases, something that he carefully didn't have in his examples.

> So the examples were made up to make it look like it's a spiral, but type parsing is about precedence, not about spirals. It so happens that the higher-precedence operators ([] and ()) are on the right-hand side, which is why it "works" to start on the right.

> And it doesn't explain why

> typedef int (fn_t[][2])(void);

> is ok, but

> typedef int (fn_t[2][])(void);

> is not.

> "Spirals"? I don't think so.

[dnquark]

All these years I assumed that the 'spiral rule' and 'right-left rule' (linked from the stephencanon comment above, and also described in my second link) are two ways to describe the same algorithm, but, reading closely, they aren't! I guess 'spiral rule' is a stickier name, which is why it's something that people remember even though it's janky.

[a_t48]

    typedef int *(**fn_t[][2])(void);

is ok, but

    typedef int *(**fn_t[2][])(void);

is not.

(fixed formatting?)