Possible Duplicate:
Typedef pointers a good idea?
I've seen this oddity in many APIs I have used:
typedef type_t *TYPE;
My point is that declaring a variable of type TYPE will not make it clear that in fact a pointer is declared.
Do you, like me, think that this brings a lot of confusion? Is this meant to enforce encapsulation, or there are other reasons as well? Do you consider this to be a bad practice?