Warp wrote:
>   (That doesn't mean you can't have a pointer pointing to a member of an
> object, in a portable way. However, that requires either for the member
> to be public or for the object to give you the pointer.)

Actually, just thinking about it a bit more, if the class returns a pointer 
to a member variable, and you can look in the header and see that pointer is 
in an array, then you have a well-defined way of accessing the other private 
data in the same array.

Like, if the class returns a FILE* from open(), and you look in the class 
declaration and there's something along the lines of
    FILE open_files[MAX_OPEN_FILES];
then chances are you can wander up and down that array as you like. :-)

I wouldn't say that particularly breaks encapsulation tho. Just a thought.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The question in today's corporate environment is not
   so much "what color is your parachute?" as it is
   "what color is your nose?"

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