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I'm relatively new to programming in general and I was wondering if anyone could help me understand the purpose of access modifiers? I understand the fact that they set different levels of access for classes and variables etc. but why would you want to limit what has access to these? What is the point in not allowing access for different things? why not just allow access for everything? Sorry if this is a stupid question! There are thousands of reasons, but I'll quote a few from here and then expand on those: Hiding the internals of the object protects its integrity by preventing users from

Besides the normal explenation of being visible or not to derived classes, is their any other difference? If you make it more visible, is it taking more or less memory, does it slow thing down or...? Nawaz Apart from the accessibility of members outside or to the derived classes, access specifiers might affect the object layout. Quoting from my other answer : Usually, memory address for data members increases in the order they're defined in the class . But this order may be disrupted at any place where the access-specifiers ( private , protected , public ) are encountered . This has been

Whenever I create new classes using Visual Studio 2010 Express C# it creates them with no access modifier. 9 times out of 10 I want my new classes to be public. How can I have Visual Studio create empty class templates with the "public" modifier by default? The trick is to create a new item template named Class. Then when you do Add > New Class, your template will be selected by default rather than the built-in Class template. (I am not sure if this behaviour is guaranteed but it Works On My Machine (TM).) To create the template: Right-click in your project and choose Add > Class. You can

I would like to know what could be reasons to provide a public access method returning a reference instead of making the member public. QPoint has methods int& rx and int& ry that let me directly manipulate the coordinates. I guess the implentation looks similar to this: public: int& rx(){return x;} private: int x; The only idea I had so far is the following: By keeping the member private and "only" providing a reference, the class can still change to use a different data type for its coordinates and while still "somehow" returning a reference to an int. However, this "somehow" would always

I find this question very interesting after reading the part of "Effective C++" about public inheritance. Before it would be common sense for me to say yes, because every square is a rectangle, but not necessarily other way around. However consider this code: void makeBigger(Rectangle& r) { r.setWidth(r.width() + 10); } This code is perfectly fine for a Rectangle , but would break the Square object if we passed it to makeBigger - its sides would become unequal. So how can I deal with this? The book didn't provide an answer (yet?), but I'm thinking of a couple of ways of fixing this: Override

I have created a plugin to convert an HTML select box into a custom drop down using DIV's. All works well, but i'd like to make it a little better. see my jsFiddle At the end of the plugin I have 2 methods, slideDownOptions & slideUpOptions, I would like to make these available outside of the plugin so other events can trigger the action. Im getting a little confused how to do this and more specifically how to call the methods from both within the plugin AND from outside of the plugin. Any help always appreciated Think about refactoring your plugin using object oriented code. With this you can