Should class members be sorted?

On a new project with a new team, should we enforce to sort the members of the classes automatically in a specific order (e.g. by modifier and alphabet) prior to check-in?

The alternative is to let each developer group the members as he thinks. And since everyone has a different opinion of what is related and how the grouping should be, this pretty much comes down to random order.

So what are the pros and cons of having them sorted automatically? Is this bound to a specific IDE/development-process/build-process/language? What else do we have to consider?

Edit to foster more answers:

I once was in a project where we had to maintain several branches. Because of the inability of the RCS to support this appropriately (SVN by the time), we had to manually move classes and methods from one branch to another and than merge back again (most RCS can maintain a subset-superset-relation only in one direction). Because the methods could appear anywhere in the class in any order, merging was a nightmare. Enforcing automatic sorting of members right from the beginning would have avoided much of the pain.

On the other hand, if working in a long existing project wi开发者_Python百科thout automatic sort order, it can be a bad idea to enforce this. Moving all the members around is basically the same as throwing away the versioning up to this point, because comparing files with older versions via diff will be no good anymore for the same reason that merging in the other project was a pain.

Same goes if refactoring is due. When methods are renamed they will also be moved, making a diff of two versions practically pointless. With different names AND different places, it is difficult to recognize methods again.

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Given that your IDE can sort your members the way you prefer, I'd personally avoid a global company policy on the matter.

I think rules-for-rules-sake are an important factor in de-motivating a team. As programmers we have a certain mindset, a certain way of seeing the world. Practicality and pragmatism are often valued higher by many programmers than policy.

If it's a quick click of a couple of menu items to have the code look the way you want it to when it's your turn to look at it, I'd stick with those few clicks. (and make this into a quick keyboard shortcut for your convenience)

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I like to have a consistent code layout, but I have learned the hard way that anything which only touches the topic of "coding style" always leads to endless discussions and can waste a lot of time. It is not worth it.

Far more important is to make decisions on other topics (architecture and design, tests, how to communicate).

Usually I tend to assume that related members will be grouped together over time. I see no advantage in using an alphabetical sort order, because that is what the IDE can do for me.

Renaming, moving code, deleting green code, adding comments is nothing I like to see mixed with other changes. That is why I usually split it into two changes - one, that updates the "code layout/style" and another, which changes the behaviour of the program.

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In my case... I consider usefull to order by access level. I follow the StyleCop rules (.net but valid in any other languaje)

Public
Internal
Protected Internal
Protected
Private

static
non-static

Inside of this groups... I've some randomness, but I always put things like Id's or unique identificator first.

I'm not saying this is the better good practice in the word, but at least people know where to look for things.

Depending of the lenguaje and the IDE you choose, maybe you could be lucky and find a tool that rearange the code for you based on your owns preferences. (Resharper, in my case, It's a good help)

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I consider sorting of class members useful if it results in better readability of code. A sorting scheme should not be too strict but strict enough to add to better code readability. I prefer this sorting scheme:

• static fields
• instance fields
• constructor
• methods

Each method that calls another method (mostly private) the called method should be below the calling method.

As pointed out above the only reason to order class members should be better readability because you write code once but read it a hundred times, so having an accepted (by the team) order system can boost productivity.

Ordering code to work around inabilities of RCS will not per se lead to better readability and thus will not boost productivity. In most cases such an ordering method will fail. I'm in doubt if an alphabetic order method could lead to better readability.