Yeah, RAII helps encapsulate this pretty well at least for the object case, but the notion of having an "inverse" operation is useful in many other situations.

Yeah, RAII helps encapsulate this pretty well at least for the object case, but the notion of having an "inverse" operation is useful in many other situations. An example I've run into a lot is wanting a generalized "toggle" for DOM actions in javascript (for example, show/hide), so if some property is true, I apply a transformation, and when the property is switched off I can apply the reverse easily. The trickiness with RAII (or things like context managers in python) is that it mainly works when you have a companion object representing the action (files are the companion object to getting handlers through opening/closing for example). But what is the object you could use for scaling? You can, of course, build a Scaler object (or MultiplierFactory ;) ), but I find myself wanting to avoid objects and methods to instead go for plain functions as much as possible.