4    Friend Functions of String

• Some texts state that friend declarations cannot appear in the public section. This is at variance with Stroustrup (page 162, "The C++ Programming Language") who states that such declarations can appear anywhere in the class definition.

The friend functions declared are for the operators ==, !=, >, and >.

They are implemented using the usual C library functions for string comparison.          

Comparisons are made between the Buffer fields of the two String objects.