What is the purpose of accessors?

Question

Can somebody help me understand the get & set?
Why are they needed? I can just make a public variable.

Answer 1

Get and set are used in properties. They can each be public, protected, or private. Similar to accessor and mutator methods, they allow some computation when code tries to access/mutate the property. Of course, as long as you define one of get/set, the other is optional.

Example without properties:

private int test;

public int getTest() {
    // some computation on test here, maybe?
    return test;
}

private void setTest(int test) {
    // some error/range checking, maybe?
    this.test = test;
}

With properties:

private int test;
public int Test {
    get {
        // some computation on test here, maybe?
        return test;
    }
    private set {
        // some error/range checking, maybe?
        test = value;   // value is a keyword here
    }
}