Why friend directive is missing in Java?

Question

I was wondering why Java has been designed without the frienddirective that is available in C++ to allow finer control over which methods and instance variables

Answer 1

In addition to the aforementioned package visibility, Java also offers inner and anonymous classes which are not only friends by default, but also automatically have a reference to the containing class. Since creating such helper classes is probably the only reasonable way to use friend in C++, Java doesn't need it since it has another mechanism for that. Iterators are a very good example of this.