看看Borland自己怎么说的吧!
What do the PRIVATE, PROTECTED, PUBLIC and PUBLISHED sections of a unit mean ?
They define the level of visibility of properties and methods of an object. In a nutshell, they are as follows:
PRIVATE Things contained in this section are private to the object. External objects do not have access to any
elements contained here.
PROTECTED Similar to private with one exception: Descendants of the object have access to the methods and
properties contained here.
PUBLIC All external objects have access to elements here.
PUBLISHED Similar to PUBLIC, but properties listed here show up at design time under the Object Inspector.
These sections really come into play when you're building components. Typically, you'll put the local field
variables assigned to properties in the PRIVATE section, along with functions and procedures that act only
within the scope of the object itself. In the PROTECTED methods, if you know the object will be inherited
at some point, you'll put properties, functions and procedures to give access to your descendants, but
maintain privacy from external objects. In the PUBLIC section, you'll place methods and procedures that
usually don't have a corresponding property, but require full access by other entities
or, insert properties
that you don't want visible in the Object Inspector. The PUBLISHED section by convention is for properties
only, though I've put procedures there just to see if I still had access to them.
TForms have PRIVATE and PUBLIC sections as well. In most cases you won't put them to use
however, there will
be times when you want to add functionality and capabilities to the form that need to be assigned levels of
visibility.
Play around with this stuff. The more you understand it, the more you'll understand object-oriented programming.
By the way, I suggest getting a book on general object-oriented programming principles. Understanding the theory
behind objects will help you get a better handle on Delphi programming.