CPP11 — 2 of4 issues with Abstract interfaces

2. I do not understand this bullet in section 1.18.2:

"o Inserting an abstract interface reference into a CORBA::Any operates
polymorphically; either the object reference or valuetype to which the
abstract interface reference refers is what actually gets inserted into
the Any. Because abstract interfaces cannot actually be inserted into an
Any, there is no need for abstract interface extraction operators,
either. The CORBA::Any::to_abstract_base type allows the contents of an
Any to be extracted as an AbstractBase if the entity stored in the Any
is an object reference type or a valuetype directly or indirectly
derived from the AbstractBase base class. See Section 1.16.6, Widening
to Abstract Interface, on page 1-62 for details."

This seems to make no sense. It seems to state that the actual
reference or valuetype is inserted into the Any, which means that the
TCKind associated with the any will be tk_objref or tk_value, not
tk_abstract_interface. This seems to have particularly bad implications
with the DII & DSI. How does the DII know to encode an abstract
interface correctly in CDR if the Any it receives doesn't have a
tk_abstract_interface TypeCode? It also means that an application which
only knows the abstract interface type must handle the case where the
Any has a tk_objref or tk_value instead, use Any::to_abstract_interface
and then a narrow call to get the abstract interface pointer it needs.

This seems needlessly complex and unnecessary. This bullet should be
replaced with one that just states that abstract interfaces have
inserters and extractors generated for them just like normal interfaces.

closed/resolved