In C++, a friend function is a function that is given special access to the private and protected members of a class. This allows the function to access and modify the internal state of the class, even if the function is not a member of the class. A friend function is declared using the keyword "friend" before the function declaration, and it is defined outside the class. The friend function can be a member of another class, or it can be a non-member function. For example, consider the following class called Time: class Time { private: int h/ours; int minutes; public: Time(int h = 0, int m = 0); friend void addMinutes(Time &t, int m); } ; In this example, the Time class has two private members, hours and minutes, and a constructor that sets the initial values. It also has a friend function called addMinutes, which takes two parameters: a reference to a Time object and an integer. The function can access the private members of the