On 14 December 2013 23:06, Peter Crosthwaite <peter.crosthwa...@xilinx.com> wrote: > On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 6:26 AM, Antony Pavlov <antonynpav...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> What do the "< private >" and "< public >" comments exactly mean here? > > Private means inaccessible to everybody, including the implementation > of class being instantiated. No one should ever dereference a private > variable, they should be managed by QOM indirectly via casts if > needed. Public means that at least someone can access it. Note that > public does not declare a free-for-all. QOM class variables may be > "public" in the sense that the class implementation may access them. > Container devices however still can not, and they are private from > that point of view.
I'm not sure I find this a terribly convincing explanation. Last time I asked this IIRC the answer was just "they need to be there for the output of the documentation generator". The usual definition of 'public' vs 'private' is "what can a user of the object rather than the implementor safely access?". That would be actually interesting to document IMHO. (I should resurrect my patch for marking those fields up with __private so we enforce it...) thanks -- PMM
