[saidinesh5]

I think that's a problem with C's header files.

With C++ you have the third option where the compiler makes sure that the "people will do the right thing" with the private keyword - assuming they're not doing some weird pointer math to access the private members..

Of course, you'll have to deal with ABI stability now but it's all tradeoffs for what your requirements are.

[Mankaninen]

Of course you should do the right thing, but if you want to break the private of C++ it is much easier to "#define private public" before including the header file.

[saidinesh5]

now that's just diabolical...

[TheNewAndy]

Right, but as soon as you have private stuff in your header file, that is leaking implementation details. Yes it is kind of true that these are compile time checked to make sure that people don't do the wrong thing, but it is still an implementation detail that is leaking.

It comes down to a cost benefit thing - is the cost of poorer readability worth it for mitigating the risk of people doing the wrong thing? My experience says no, other people's experience says yes. Probably we are working on different problems and with different teams.