<soapbox>

Breaking encapsulation should be only used as a dire last resort -- and certainly not in production code.

Going uninvited into the innards of an object is like buying a car with airbags then disabling them, or removing your car's seatbelts. Yeah, you can do it, and eveything will seem fine for a while, and then something goes wrong and you get badly hurt.

Objects are more than a funny way to call a useful subroutine -- they are an agreement between caller and callee as to a strict API, with everything behind the API wall treated as a black box.

</soapbox>

Apologies if I am preaching to the converted, the spirit moved me.