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Best practice: ordering of public/protected/private within the class definition?

Asked 2009-11-19T04:22:20.903
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I am starting a new project from the ground up and want it to be clean / have good coding standards. In what order do the seasoned developers on here like to lay things out within a class?

A : 1) public methods 2) private methods 3) public vars 4) private vars

B : 1) public vars 2) private vars 3) public methods 4) private methods

C : 1) public vars 2) public methods 3) private methods 4)private vars

I generally like to put public static vars at the top, but then would a public static method be listed ahead of your constructor, or should the constructor always be listed first? That sort of thing...

I know it's finnicky but I just wondered: what are best practices for this?

PS: no I don't use Cc#. I know. I'm a luddite.

oop coding-style class-design
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2 Answers

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I generally agree with the public, protected, private order as well as the static data, member data, member functions order.

Though I sometimes group like members (getters & setters) I generally prefer listing members within a group ALPHABETICALLY so that they can be located more easily.

I also like lining up the data/functions vertically. I tab/space over to the right enough so that all names are aligned in the same column.

answered 2009-11-19T04:43:17.603
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To each his own, and as Elzo says, modern IDEs have made it easier to find members and their modifiers in an easy way with colored icons in drop-down menus and such.

My take is that it is more important for the programmer to know what the class was designed for, and how it can be expected to behave.

So, if it is a Singleton, I put the semantics (static getInstance() class) first.

If it is a concrete factory, I put the getNew() function and the register / initialize functions first.

... and so on. When I say first, I mean soon after the c'tors and d'tor - since they are the default way of instantiating any class.

The functions that follow are then in:

  1. logical call-order (e.g. initialize(), preProcess(), process(), postProcess() ), or
  2. related functions together (like accessors, utilities, manipulators etc),

depending on if the class was meant primarily to be a data-store with some functions, or function provider with a few data members.

answered 2009-11-19T20:19:22.947

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