[mattgreenrocks]

Amen.

RAII will be in the next great language, as it is a useful tool. This is not an academic concern, it is something that happens all the time due to rushed deadlines, stressed developers, or simple naivete.

People love to slag off C++ but the higher-level devs have done some serious thinking about how to engineer robust programs. Sutter's 'Exceptional C++' is eye-opening the first time around, and the concepts are applicable to any language that has exception handling. Programming in a transactional manner has visibly improved my designs -- mostly through the paranoia that almost any statement could throw an exception.