typedef array type in C

`typedef int arr[10]`

I understand that the above statement defines a new name for int[10]
so that

arr intArray;

is equivalent to

int intArray[10];

However, I am confused by the convention for doing this. It seems to me that

`typedef int arr[10]`

is confusing and a clear way to me is

`typedef int[10] arr`

i.e. I define the "int[10]" to be a new type called arr

However, the compiler does not accept this.

May I ask why ? Is it just a convention for C language ?

Because that's how the language was defined. My guess is that, in part, it is so that what goes into a `typedef` follows the same rules as a normal variable declaration, except that the name is the name of the type instead of a variable (and thus that part of the parser can be re-used).

Very early versions of C didn't have the `typedef` keyword. When it was added to the language (some time before 1978), it had to done in a way that was consistent with the existing grammar.

Syntactically, the keyword `typedef` is treated as a *storage class specifier*, like `extern` or `static`, even though its meaning is quite different.

So just as you might write:

static int arr[10];

you'd write:

typedef int arr[10];

Think of a `typedef` declaration as something similar to an object declaration. The difference is that the identifier it creates (`arr` in this case) is a type name rather than an object name.