9.3. Class Scope and Accessing Class Members

A class’s data members and member functions belong to that class’s scope. Nonmember functions are defined at global namespace scope, by default. (We discuss namespaces in more detail in Section 21.4.)

Within a class’s scope, class members are immediately accessible by all of that class’s member functions and can be referenced by name. Outside a class’s scope, public class members are referenced through one of the handles on an object—an object name, a reference to an object or a pointer to an object. The type of the object, reference or pointer specifies the interface (e.g., the member functions) accessible to the client. [We’ll see in Section 9.13 that an implicit handle is inserted by the compiler on every reference to a data member or member function from within an object.]