Access Types
A declaration specifies the access type of the entity it declares. An entity’s access type does not change the scope of an entity’s name.
To specify an access type, use the Access keyword for any of the declaration op codes. The four access types of the Access keyword are * Public, *Private, *Protected, and *Internal. * Public is the most permissive access type, and the other three types are all subsets of * Public .
The default Access type is *PRIVATE, indicating that the entity being declared will not be shared.
- *PRIVATE (default) - access is accessible only from within their declaration context, including from members of any nested types, for example from within a nested procedure or from an assignment expression in a nested enumeration.
- *PUBLIC - access is accessible from anywhere within the same project, from other projects that reference the project, and from an assembly built from the project.
- *PROTECTED - access is accessible only from within the same class, or from a class derived from this class.
- *INTERNAL - access is accessible from within the same project, but not from outside the project.
The accessibility in a declaration does not depend on the accessibility of the declaration context. For example, a type declared with * Private access may contain a type member with * Public access.