Re: how to recognize whether code is C or C++?
On May 22, 11:51 pm, Noah Roberts <n...@nowhere.com> wrote:
Ian Collins wrote:
Jeff Schwab wrote:
[...]
One could argue writing the public interface before the
private data it uses is akin to top posting.....
Writing the public interface first puts the most interesting
and important information about an interface as the first
thing you see.
In a well organized shop, the *only* thing I'll see of a class
is its documentation, unless I'm actually maintaining the class
(and even then, I won't look at the class definition itself
until I've understood the documentation).
Of course, in the real world, things aren't always that well
organized, and you're right.
Implementation details, such as private member variables,
rarely need to be accessed or read. One would prefer they not
be in the interface at all, and you can use pimpl's to make
that happen, but this is C++ so we must make do. If you are
using a pimpl then it makes even less sense to have that as
the top most item of importance in a class declaration since
it's completely meaningless to the interface.
An interesting (maybe), although purely anecdotal data point:
when I use the compilation firewall idiom, the implementation
class often will be declared "struct", i.e.:
Toto.hh:
class Toto
{
public:
// ...
private:
class Impl ;
Impl* myImpl ;
} ;
Toto.cc:
struct Toto::Impl
{
// ...
} ;
But of course, it's not rare for the Impl class to contain
mainly public data as well.
--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@gmail.com
Conseils en informatique orient=E9e objet/
Beratung in objektorientierter Datenverarbeitung
9 place S=E9mard, 78210 St.-Cyr-l'=C9cole, France, +33 (0)1 30 23 00 34