If they're alphabetical, would that not imply there is, in fact, no creativity
in the organisation? That creativity has specifically been removed from the
process?
And how is that therefore any different to phone directories, which I understand
are not copyrightable (Feist v. Rural, 1991, US Supreme Court)?[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Varies.
The online documentation from Oracle, formerly from Sun, lists
the
information about a class in the following way.
- Package the
class belongs to
- Ancestor classes
- Fields in alphabetic
order
- Constructors
- Public and protected methods in alphabetic
order
As to sequence, alphabetic ordering is what javadoc, the
utility that Sun
and Oracle provide for making documentation, generates.
Clearly, there's no
advantage to
putting the package info before or after the
methods. I think some people like
to show the void setXXX(T t) next to the T
getXXX() method, as this
communicates something about what one may call the
property fields of the
class and whether a property is read-only, write-only,
or read-write. But
beyond
programmer convenience for looking things up,
sequencing in the java
documentation isn't remotely as important
as it is to a
computer program where one instruction has to precede another in
order to
implement an algorithm. Just a note, with distributed and parallel
processing
becoming more common, sequence of execution is becoming an
abstraction. That is
to say, two lines being consecutive in a program does not
necessarily mean line
1 is started and finished before line 2 is started. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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