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

Question

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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

This would be my ordering

1. Static Variables
2. Static Methods
3. Public Variables
4. Protected Variables
5. Private Variables
6. Constructors
7. Public Methods
8. Protected Methods
9. Private Methods

I use the following rules:

• static before anything
• variables before constructors before methods (i consider constructors to be in the category of methods)
• public before protected before private

The idea is that you define the object (the data), before the behaviours (methods). Statics need to be separated because they aren't really part of the object, nor it's behaviour.

Answer 4

Some editors, like Eclipse and its offspring, allow you to reorder in the outline view the the vars and the methods, alphabetically or as in page.