Modern C++ Programming Cookbook

How it works...

The attorney-client idiom lays out a simple mechanism to restrict access to the private parts of the client by introducing a middleman, the attorney. Instead of providing friendship directly to those using its internal state, the client class offers friendship to an attorney, which in turn provides access to a restricted set of private data or functions of the client. It does so by defining private static functions. Usually, these are also inline functions, which avoids any runtime overhead due to the level of indirection the attorney class introduces. The client’s friend gets access to its private parts by actually using the private parts of the attorney. This idiom is called attorney-client because it is similar to the way ...