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Comment by yakubin | Hacker News Reader

IME I write about 10-20 as many data records as "classes". I do use "private" from time to time to protect invariants. But if the default was switched to public, my code on balance would be a lot shorter and readable. I'm not saying that "private" shouldn't exist. I'm saying it's a poor default.

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In c++ you choose the default so I'm not sure it should be lumped in with the others.

In the literal sense private is default though. I wonder why. Lexical sorting of private, protected and public?

It makes almost no sense to have all private class fields and methods. The only thing I can think of is fat handles with friend classes or functions.

In c++ a class declared with the keyword 'class' is private by default, and a class declared with the keyword 'struct' is public by default. So if you want public by default just write 'struct' (somehow this is not commonly known).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B_classes

I think the “somehow” is not too hard to guess… it is easy to think that “class” is the only way to declare a class, especially since “struct” is taken from C. I’m sure very few intro C++ explanations ever mention “struct” as a way to declare a class.

There's quite a lot about C++ which wouldn't be covered in a simple tutorial, but the meaning of class/struct is a pretty basic part of the language, hardly obscure.

Maybe it's something you could miss if you're coming from a strong C background and still thinking of C++ as C-with-classes, but otherwise it's something any serious user of the language would pick up.

This comment represents some of the worst elitism I see in the programming community.

Yes, I meant common introductory material should mention (and use) it (I think Bjarne does mention it, but I wouldnt call it introductory material)

struct over class then.

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