Convention

Rationale

Example

In Outlook for iOS, we have our own style guide for Swift which is much more fully fledged than this style guide. I believe we also have more lines of Swift than anyone else at Microsoft, and have already shared our style guide with numerous other teams. Based on that, I think it would be a massive win for Swift programmers at Microsoft (and anyone else using this style guide) to merge our one into here.

The problem is that our style guide doesn't follow the layout of this one and it would be quite an undertaking as far as I can tell to integrate it. This is what we have for now: https://msiosdocs.azurewebsites.net/source_code/style_guide/swift/

How can we effectively integrate the two style guides?

Edit: This isn't a new convention but there wasn't a "general issue" button.

What convention is being referenced?

As mentioned in #9, we don't have a good example of the ``fileprivate` access modifier in use.

How do you propose this convention could be improved? Please provide rationale and examples if possible.

Add an example of where that is a good idea

What convention is being referenced?

The ordering in a file suggests most "important" to least "important", where how important it is is proportional to its visibility. i.e. public is the most important and private is the least important. This gives an interesting example of a code like this (trimmed here):

public class House {

    // public functions
    public init {
    // ...
    }

    private var size: Int = 0

}

You can see that the instance variable is at the bottom of the definition.

How do you propose this convention could be improved? Please provide rationale and examples if possible.

This rule is overly broad and not particularly helpful. Convention across the last several decades of programming has us put instance variables at the top of the file usually. We should correct to allow for this at the very least.

I'd also argue that a small private helper method makes more sense to be located next to the public method that uses it, rather than at the other end of the file.