NonTemplate Function Friend of Class Template

On Lippman p656 I read:

A nontemplate function or class can be a friend to a class template:

template<class Type> class Bar {
    friend class Foobar;
    friend void fcn();
}; 

I wonder what all this means. If fcn is made a friend it is becuase you want it to access the private members of Bar, but how can it access them it if has not got any Bar object passed into as a parameter?

Can somebody please enlighten me on this?

Being afriend of a class X means the friend (whether it's function, or class) has access to all private and protected members of the class X.

In your example, the class Foobar and the function fcn has access to private and protected members of the class Bar.

Now the question is:

how can it access them it if has not got any Bar object passed into as a parameter?

Well, it can access if it has instance of Bar. For example.

void fcn()
{
   Bar<int> bar;
   bar.PrivateFun(); //okay even if PrivateFun is a private function of Bar
   bar.PrivateData = 10; //okay even if PrivateData is a private data of Bar
}

Just to emphasize the difference, consider this another function:

void g()
{
   Bar<int> bar;
   bar.PrivateFun(); //compilation error - g() is not a friend of Bar!
   bar.PrivateData = 10; //compilation error - g() is not a friend of Bar!
}

Hope it helps you understanding what it means to have access to private members of a class, and what it means to be a friend of a class!

Perhaps there is a global Bar<T> which it can access- just because there is no obvious parameter doesn't mean that it can't access a Bar<T>. Also, that's ill-formed syntax.