But, I think many C++ programmers think of using the former for the purpose of the latter. Especially any code that wants to undo/fixate things by playing with the caller's blocks (as mentioned in earlier discussions) it needs to be clear that setting up something triggered when a variable goes out of scope (e.g. restore from a temp) is not the same as code that's simply inserted just before the close brace of that scope. Earlier, your comments about doing without prompt destruction made me think that we would indeed be using the "finally"-like mechanism for that purpose.