Original Post
Greetings everyone. Is there a generally accepted way to hold private members/methods in a class? In other words, I am working on this wrapper class to simplify the fact that we jump between 2 3rd party imaging libraries and a WIP proprietary imaging library (you wouldn't wanna see the code here...). Now in this class there are quite a bit of members and methods which are used to tie these different libraries together. For the sake of that nice auto-completion dropdown you get in VS2005 (honestly no other reason...), I was considering grouping everything into a private struct (with all members publicly accessible from the classes point of view), since there may possibly be more private functionality than there is public functionality, and this thing is growing fast. Is there a better way to do this? How do others do it? I see many (including STL) use an underscore followed by the name to denote private members and methods and we get the grouping of all private members to the top of the drop down list for free. This however, if I understand correctly, is "reserved" by Microsoft for use... meaning '_' shouldn't be used as a prefix normally. Now I realize that may be a moot point and there shouldn't be a problem with using '_' as a prefix... but there would still be a bit of private members to scroll through that you would never be able to use anyways..... Any thoughts? Is grouping it all in a private data struct a bad idea? What do you all do? I know everyone will have different coding standards but that's why I'm asking. Cheers -Scott
