Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours, Third Edition

Accessing Class Members

After you define an actual Cat object (for example, Frisky), you use the dot operator (.) to access the member functions of that object. Therefore, to assign 50 to Frisky's itsWeight member variable, you would write

Frisky.itsWeight = 50;

In the same way, to call the Meow() function, you would write

Frisky.Meow();
					

Assign to Objects, Not to Classes

In C++ you don't assign values to types; you assign values to variables. For example, you would never write

int = 5;                // wrong

The compiler would flag this as an error because you can't assign 5 to an integer. Rather, you must define an integer variable and assign 5 to that variable. For example:

int  x;                 // define x to be an int
x = 5;                  // set x's value to 5

This is a shorthand ...