[int_19h]

I think the question is why it binds to the variable rather than the type. It's obviously a choice that the designers have made; e.g. C# has very similar syntax, but:

   int* x, y;

declares two pointers.

I think the syntax and the underpinning "declaration follows use" rule are what they got when they tried to generalize the traditional array declaration syntax with square brackets after the array name which they inherited directly from B, and ultimately all the way from Algol:

   int x, y[10], z[20];

In B, though, arrays were not a type; when you wrote this:

   auto x, y[10], z[20];

x, y, and z all have the same type (word); the [] is basically just alloca(). This all works because the type of element in any array is also the same (word), so you don't need to distinguish different arrays for the purposes of correctly implementing [].

But in C, the compiler has to know the type of the array element, since it can vary. Which means that it has to be reflected in the type of the array, somehow. Which means that arrays are now a type, and thus [] is part of the type declaration.

And if you want to keep the old syntax for array declarations, then you get this situation where the type is separated by the array name in the middle. If you then try to formalize this somehow, the "declaration follows use" rule feels like the simplest way to explain it, and applying it to pointers as well makes sense from a consistency perspective.