8.3 Controlling Access to Members
The access modifiers public
and private
control access to a class’s variables and methods. In Chapter 9, we’ll introduce the additional access modifier protected
. The primary purpose of public
methods is to present to the class’s clients a view of the services the class provides (i.e., the class’s public
interface). Clients need not be concerned with how the class accomplishes its tasks. For this reason, the class’s private
variables and private
methods (i.e., its implementation details) are not accessible to its clients.
Figure 8.3 demonstrates that private
class members are not accessible outside the class. Lines 9–11 attempt to access the private
instance variables hour
, minute
and second
of the Time1
object ...
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