> It's a bit confusing to have a 'thing' mention one mechanism in its name, but actually being valuable by ensuring some other mechanism. Indeed! When I was f

> It's a bit confusing to have a 'thing' mention one mechanism in its name, but actually being valuable by ensuring some other mechanism. Indeed! When I was first learning C++, I found the term "RAII" quite confusing too. However, after years of experience with this term, associating "RAII" with its intended meaning has become second nature. Having said that, there is at least one way to make better sense of "RAII" and that is considering the fact that in RAII, holding a resource is a class invariant. The resource is acquired during construction (initialisation) and released during destruction (which happens automatically when the object of the class goes out of scope). Throughout the object's lifetime, from construction to destruction, maintaining possession of the acquired resource is an invariant condition. Although sounds simple in principle, this can get complicated pretty quickly, especially in the implementation of the copy assignment operator where we may need to carefully delete an existing resource before copying the new resource received by the operator. Problems like this led to formulating more techniques for carefully managing the resources while satisfying the class invariant. One such technique is the copy-and-swap idiom. None of this is meant to justify the somewhat arbitrary term though. In fact, there are at least two better alternative names for RAII: Scope-Based Resource Management (SBRM) and Constructor Acquires, Destructor Releases (CADR).