Can I access private members from outside the class without using friends?
Disclaimer Yes, I am fully aware that what I am asking about is totally stupid and that anyone who would wish to try such a thing in production code should be fired and/or shot. I'm mainly looking to see if can be done. Now that that's out of the way, is there any way to access private class members in C++ from outside the class? For example, is there any way to do this with pointer offsets? (Naive and otherwise non-production-ready techniques welcome) Update As noted in the comments, I asked this question because I wanted to write a blog post on over-encapsulation (and how it affects TDD). I