CORBA3 — ORB accessor on POA?

looking at the POA IDL, I get the impression that it was written at a time
where the use of multiple ORBs in a process wasn't anticipated. With
the advent of messaging, OTS, QoS policies, etc, it is more and more common
for one application to use several ORBs simultaneously.

When writing code, it becomes an endless pain dealing with multiple ORBs.
That's because I have to endlessly pass the ORB around in my program, just
so I can do things like call object_to_string() or string_to_object(), etc.

I think it would be really useful to have an ORB() accessor on the POA
interface:

interface POA

;

The accessor would return the ORB for this POA. Doing this would eliminate
most of the cases in my code where I have to pass the ORB around. For
example, in a servant, I can call _default_POA(), and then call ORB() to
get at the ORB.

Adding the operation would cause any compatibility problems, I believe.

Opinions?

see above