Wrox Press C++ Tutorial

Structs

A language feature in C++ that is very similar to a class is the struct. This is essentially a hangover from the C language. (Windows was written in C before C++ became widely used, hence the struct appears pervasively in Windows programming.) The struct in C++, however, extends greatly the capability of the C struct - in fact, in C++ the keywords struct and class are are almost identical, and the reason struct is maintained C++ is for reasons of backward compatibility with C. The only difference between these two keywords is that the default access attribute of a struct is public, whereas, as we have already seen, the default access attribute for a class is private. A common use of structs in C++ is for classes that contain only public data members.