Class contents

[Stewbond]

When going through lines of c++ code, I constantly find code that just doesn't seem to be effecient to me. Is there any advantage to using this code:

class foo
{
private:
  int i;
public:
  int Get_i()
  { 
    return i; 
  }
  void Set_i(int input) 
  {
    i = input;
  }
};

Over this code:

class goo
{
public:
  int i;
};

People have told me that it is a "protection" thing, but that doesn't seem right since a coder could access 'i' either way (just more indirectly in one instance).

[hamsterman]

This is not inefficient since methods defined inside a class are by default inline. In your example case, this is indeed useless though. A reason to do this would be to add some error checking code insider the getters and setters.

[Stewbond]

Ahhh that makes sense. It is just for contingency in error checking. Thank you.