According to Defect Report 1875: Reordering declarations in class scope rule 3 is redundant and the proposed solution is to remove rule 3, it says:
The need for rule #3 is not clear; it would seem that any
otherwise-valid reordering would have to violate rule #2 in order to
yield a different interpretation. Taken literally, rule #3 would also
apply to simply reordering nonstatic data members with no name
dependencies at all. Can it be simply removed?
and the proposed solution is:
Delete the third item of 3.3.7 [basic.scope.class] paragraph 1 and
renumber the succeeding items
Although this defect report seems to confirm my initial suspicious I am left with a nagging feeling that perhaps rule 3 is bit broader after all. Section 3.3.7 includes the following example:
enum { i = 1 };
class X {
char v[i]; // error: i refers to ::i
// but when reevaluated is X::i
int f() { return sizeof(c); } // OK: X::c
char c;
enum { i = 2 };
};
which violates both rule 2 and 3 but a small tweak:
enum { i = 1 };
class X {
enum { i = 2 };
char v[i]; // no longer refers to ::i
// but reordering can cause it to refer to ::i again
int f() { return sizeof(c); } // OK: X::c
char c;
};
seems to no longer violate rule 2 but sure seems to violate rule 3. I would consider this code example to be troublesome since a reordering of the members could easily cause the code to be back in violation of rule 2 but no diagnostic is required to indicate this which makes this code rather fragile.
Update
As far as I understand rule 3 does not apply to this example mentioned by Casey in the comment:
class X { int a; int b; };
because even though there is more than one valid ordering this case does not fall under both rule 1 and 2 which rule 3 requires:
alternate valid program under (1) and (2)