Question

I have been coding regurlarly in C++ in the past months. I am getting used to it step by step… but there are things that confuse me about formatting.

I know there is a lot of legacy from C that I supousee mixes with C++. This time I have doubts about how to order properly my members and functions within in a class. Also considering their access modifiers.

How is the convention in this? Until know I am doing everything “public” and writing first constructor of class, then destructor, next members and finally functions. It this correct? What happens when introducing “private” and “protected” access modifiers or “virtual” functions?

From the documents I have look in the Internet there is different ways of doing things. But my questions aims to get the knowledge from a community that develops in C++ that I want to blend into. 😉

Thanks a lot!!!

Answer 1

My humble opinion, after having read many style guides all over the ‘net:

• Public first, because that is the interface of your class, which people want to see first.
• From the same reasoning, private goes last.
• If you have any private functions, place them before private members. (Again, same reasoning. Your members are of the least interest to anyone.)
• Constructor first in the public section, because people have to call that before they have an object on which to invoke any functions.
• Destructor right after the constructor, just to have them in one place.
• Within the public / protected / private sections, find some grouping logical to any users of the library, and write a one-line comment in front of each group. (Doesn’t matter that much what’s the logic, as long as it’s documented.)
• Don’t make any rules more complicated than this, because the more complicated, the easier to get it wrong (or just ignore it as inconvenient).

Remember that members should be initialized in the order they are declared, and destroyed in the reverse order.