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In all examples discussed up to now, we've seen that private members are
only accessible by the members of their class. This is good, as it
enforces encapsulation and data hiding. By encapsulating functionality
within a class we prevent that a class exposes multiple responsibilities; by
hiding data we promote a class's data integrity and we prevent that other
parts of the software become implementation dependent on the data that
belong to a class.
In this (very) short chapter we introduce the friend keyword and the
principles that underly its use. The bottom line being that by using the
friend keyword functions are granted access to a class's private
members. Even so, this does not imply that the principle of data hiding is
abandoned when the friend keyword is used.
In this chapter the topic of friendship among classes is not discussed. Situations in which it is natural to use friendship among classes are discussed in chapters 17 and 21 and such situations are natural extensions of the way friendship is handled for functions.
There should be a well-defined conceptual reason for declaring friendship
(i.e., using the friend keyword). The traditionally offered definition of
the class concept usually looks something like
this:
A class is a set of data together with the functions that operate on that set of data.
As we've seen in chapter 11 some functions have to be defined
outside of a class interface. They are defined outside of the class interface
to allow promotions for their operands or to extend the facilities of existing
classes not directly under our control. According to the above traditional
definition of the class concept those functions that cannot be defined in the
class interface itself should nevertheless be considered functions belonging
to the class. Stated otherwise: if permitted by the language's syntax they
would certainly have been defined inside the class interface. There are two
ways to implement such functions. One way consists of implementing those
functions using available public member functions. This approach was used,
e.g., in section 11.2. Another approach applies the definition of
the class concept to those functions. By stating that those functions in fact
belong to the class they should be given direct access to the data members of
objects. This is accomplished by the friend keyword.
As a general principle we state that all functions operating on the data of objects of a class that are declared in the same file as the class interface itself belong to that class and may be granted direct access to the class's data members.
Person (cf. section 9.3) was implemented like this:
ostream &operator<<(ostream &out, Person const &person)
{
return
out <<
"Name: " << person.name() << ", "
"Address: " << person.address() << ", "
"Phone: " << person.phone();
}
Person objects can now be inserted into streams.
However, this implementation required three member functions to be called,
which may be considered a source of inefficiency. An improvement would be
reached by defining a member Person::insertInto and let operator<<
call that function. These two functions could be defined as follows:
std::ostream &operator<<(std::ostream &out, Person const &person)
{
return person.insertInto(out);
}
std::ostream &Person::insertInto(std::ostream &out)
{
return
out << "Name: " << d_name << ", "
"Address: " << d_address << ", "
"Phone: " << d_phone;
}
As insertInto is a member function it has direct access to the
object's data members so no additional member functions must be called when
inserting person into out.
The next step consists of realizing that insertInto is only defined
for the benefit of operator<<, and that operator<<, as it is declared
in the header file containing Person's class interface should be
considered a function belonging to the class Person. The member
insertInto can therefore be omitted when operator<< is declared as a
friend.
Friend functions must be declared as friends in the class interface. These
friend declarations are not member
functions, and so they are independent of the class's private, protected
and public sections. Friend declaration may be placed anywhere in the
class interface. Convention dictates that friend declaractions are listed
directly at the top of the class interface. The class Person, using
friend declaration for its extraction and insertion operators starts like
this:
class Person
{
friend std::ostream &operator<<(std::ostream &out, Person &pd);
friend std::istream &operator>>(std::istream &in, Person &pd);
// previously shown interface (data and functions)
};
The insertion operator may now directly access a Person object's data
members:
std::ostream &operator<<(std::ostream &out, Person const &person)
{
return
cout << "Name: " << person.d_name << ", "
"Address: " << person.d_address << ", "
"Phone: " << person.d_phone;
}
Friend declarations are true declarations. Once a class contains friend
declarations these friend functions do not have to be declared again below the
class's interface. This also clearly indicates the class designer's intent:
the friend functions are declared by the class, and can thus be considered
functions belonging to the class.
class keyword no longer has to be provided. E.g.,
class Friend; // declare a class
typedef Friend FriendType; // and a typedef for it
using FName = Friend; // and a using declaration
class Class1
{
friend Friend; // FriendType and FNaem: also OK
};
In the pre-C++11 standards the friend declaration required an explicit
class; e.g., friend class Friend.
The explicit use of class remains required if the compiler hasn't seen
the friend's name yet. E.g.,
class Class1
{
// friend Unseen; // fails to compile: Unseen unknown.
friend class Unseen; // OK
};
Section 22.10 covers the use of extended friend declarations in
class templates.