Exactly this. Whatever you allow people to do - they will, at some point. At some point, monkey-patched code gets used in someone's library, at some point the

Exactly this. Whatever you allow people to do - they will, at some point. At some point, monkey-patched code gets used in someone's library, at some point they put it on Github, and at some point it gets forked. The OP is literally suggesting replacing "private" with either "public" or "protected" in C++ code, and then expecting comments/documentation to communicate what was already communicated previously by "private".