I'm told by my friend at Apple that C++ classes don't really enforce private/protected access and that all I'd need is a pointer to an instance of the class to access everything. He said it was mainly to prevent screwing up on my part as the developer, and also that Java, for example, strictly enforces it.
I have to ask though. Is there a way to enforce this in C++ using GCC, if not a non-compiler-specific workaround, or am I out of luck?