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


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.


Solution

  • In Clean Code, Robert C. Martin advises coders to always put member variables at the top of the class (constants first, then private members) and methods should be ordered in such a way so that they read like a story that doesn't cause the reader to need to jump around the code too much. This is a more sensible way to organize code rather than by access modifier.