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When should you use 'friend' in C++?

I have come to a stumbling block because of lack of documentation on friend classes. Most books just explain it briefly, e.g an excerpt from C++: the Complete Reference:

Friend Classes are seldom used. They are supported to allow certain special case situations to be handled.

And frankly, I have never seen a friend class in any good code made by an experienced C++ programmer. So , here is my list of problems.

  1. Do Inherited Classes have the same friends as there base classes? e.g, if I declare class foo as a friend of class base, will class der (derived from base) also have foo as a friend?

  2. What are the special case situations when a friend class should be used?

  3. I am making a winapi wrapper in which I want to make class WinHandle a friend of class Widget (to access some protected members). Is it recommended? Or should I just access them using the traditional Get/Set functions?

c++ oop class class-design friend
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