13.1.25.1 Handling Typed Values

To decrease the chances of creating an any with a mismatched TypeCode and value, the C++ function overloading facility is utilized. Specifically, for each distinct type in an OMG IDL specification, overloaded functions to insert and extract values of that type are provided. Overloaded operators are used for these functions to completely avoid any name space pollution. The nature of these functions, which are described in detail below, is that the appropriate TypeCode is implied by the C++ type of the value being inserted into or extracted from the any.

Since the type-safe any interface described below is based upon C++ function overloading, it requires C++ types generated from OMG IDL specifications to be distinct. However, there are special cases in which this requirement is not met:

• The Boolean, octet, and char OMG IDL types are not required to map to distinct C++ types, which means that a separate means of distinguishing them from each other for the purpose of function overloading is necessary. The means of distinguishing these types from each other is described in Distinguishing Boolean, Octet, Char, and Bounded Strings.
• Since all strings are mapped to char* regardless of whether they are bounded or unbounded, another means of creating or setting an any with a bounded string value is necessary.
• In C++, arrays within a function argument list decay into pointers to their first elements. This means that function overloading cannot be used to distinguish between arrays of different sizes. The means for creating or setting an any when dealing with arrays is described below and in Arrays.