I explain this in my answer to Why was the C syntax for arrays, pointers, and functions designed this way?, and it basically comes down to:
the language authors preferred to make the syntax variable-centric rather than type-centric. That is, they wanted a programmer to look at the declaration and think “if I write the expression
*func(arg)
, that’ll result in anint
; if I write*arg[N]
I’ll have a float” rather than “func
must be a pointer to a function taking this and returning that“.The C entry on Wikipedia claims that:
Ritchie’s idea was to declare identifiers in contexts resembling their use: “declaration reflects use”.
…citing p122 of K&R2.