28. Public Access Modifiers

The public Members

•  All the class members declared under the public specifier will be available to everyone.
• The data members and member functions declared as public can be accessed by other classes and functions too.
• The public members of a class can be accessed from anywhere in the program using the direct member access operator (.) with the object of that class. 

A public member is accessible from anywhere outside the class but within a program. You can set and get the value of public variables without any member function as shown in the following example −

Example

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
 
class Line {
   public:
      double length;
      void setLength( double len );
      double getLength( void );
};
 
// Member functions definitions
double Line::getLength(void) {
   return length ;
}
 
void Line::setLength( double len) {
   length = len;
}
 
// Main function for the program
int main() {
   Line line;
 
   // set line length
   line.setLength(6.0); 
   cout << "Length of line : " << line.getLength() <<endl;
 
   // set line length without member function
   line.length = 10.0; // OK: because length is public
   cout << "Length of line : " << line.length <<endl;
   
   return 0;
}

When the above code is compiled and executed, it produces the following result −

Length of line : 6
Length of line : 10