What is public access?

Answer 1

In a class definition, the keyword "public:" denotes that all the following members (both variables and methods) are accessible to all consumers of the class. The access specifier remains in force until another access specifier is encountered, however the same specifier may be repeated throughout the definition, and they may appear in any order.

Note that a class always has full access to all of its own members, regardless of the access specifiers. However, class members may be public, protected or private. This determines how accessible those members are to the consumers of the class. In other words, they determine how much of the interface you expose outside of the class.

Unless otherwise specified, all class members are private. Private members are only accessible to the class itself, and friends of the class (whether those friends are entire classes, individual class methods, or individual functions).

Protected members are similar to private members, but are also accessible to derived classes.

Public members are accessible to all consumers of the class.