Public Top - Private Down
A seemingly small optimization, but ever since I switched to this convention, I have a way more fun time to grasp my classes, especially after I haven't looked at them for 42 years.
Having a consistent member visibility, going from points of frequent interest down to the boring stuff, is extremely helpful, especially when the code ought to be self-documenting.
(sidenote for qt-users: slots come before signals because they should be callable like non-slot member functions, and apart from their slottyness be indistinguishable from non-slots)
- Public, protected, private
- then Factory, ctor, dtor, copying, swapping
- then the class' Interface
At the very last, in a seperate
private: section, comes the data (ideally only an impl-pointer).
This rule also helps a ton if you have problems keeping your class declaration uncluttered.
class Widget : public Purple {
public:
// Factory methods.
Widget FromRadians (float);
Widget FromDegrees (float);
// Ctors, rule of three, swap
Widget();
Widget (Widget const&);
Widget &operator = (Widget const &);
void swap (Widget &) throw();
// Member methods.
float area() const;
// in case of qt {{
public slots:
void invalidateBlackHole();
signals:
void areaChanged (float);
// }}
protected:
// same as public, but for protected members
private:
// same as public, but for private members
private:
// data
float widgetness_;
bool isMale_;
};
