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Authored by: ThrPilgrim on Saturday, April 21 2012 @ 05:23 PM EDT |
what order should the methods appear in? It doesn't actually
matter
Actually the order of the methods may well be more
constrained than you think, as you will want to minimise forward declarations of
functions in the package.
This assumes that you have to declare
methods/functions in Java before you can use them. I don't know enougth about
Java to know if this is true or not. --- Beware of him who would deny
you access to information for in his heart he considers himself your master. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: bugstomper on Saturday, April 21 2012 @ 08:18 PM EDT |
The Javadoc documentation that is generated from the source code with comments
sorts everything into alphabetical order for the summary sections, so you can
look things up easily. The full text descriptions of the methods appear in the
documentation in the order the methods appear in the source code implementation,
which is an arbitrary order that has no significance. There would be no reason
for someone doing a clean room implementation of a class to write the methods in
the same order as in Sun's JDK implementation of that class.
No matter what order the methods appear in the source code of class, the Javadoc
API documentation that is generated from it would have the identical method
signatures (except for the arbitrary argument names) listed in the identical
(alphabetical) order in the summary sections. The only thing that would be
different in those sections would be the brief English description of what the
method does. Later, in the full section, the methods would appear in different
arbitrary order, again the signatures being the same except possible for
argument names, and the English text descriptions being different.
I don't know what the ramifications would be if someone did copy the order that
public methods were defined in a class. Since the order provides no value and
expresses no idea of consequence, is it a copyrightable element of the
implementation code of the class?
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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