When I mentioned Python's with statement, that's really all I'd want. Something neater than C's "goto error" error handling, but not much more than that. I thin

When I mentioned Python's with statement, that's really all I'd want. Something neater than C's "goto error" error handling, but not much more than that. I think there's constructs like this in some languages. > Simple rule: a class should never contain handles or pointers to more than a single resource. Composition handles the rest. The issue with this is that in the real world, you have to deal with 3rd party libraries and frameworks or even the OS syscall interface which don't follow this guideline. So you'll end up writing wrappers for all your "foreign" objects from any other libraries you use. This is a lot of work and creates impedance mismatch problems when there's no simple clearly established concept of ownership (e.g. the wrapped objects are already reference counted) or the assumptions of the library aren't friendly to C++ style semantics. If you live in a "modern C++ only" bubble, this isn't an issue.