   separate allocation & construction
  Can anyone give me an example of what that means? Does this mean I'm not allowed to allocate resources in a constructor? What's the advantage gained by not doing so? Doesn't RAII say I'm supposed to allocate resources in the constructor?EDIT: or are we talking about the difference between allocating a bunch of memory with the allocator (like a vector) and allocating and initializing a bunch of memory with the default constructor (like new does, I think)?EDIT EDIT: beaten by SiCrane :)   
  Assuming C++, you can seperate allocation and construction by using an allocator class, such as std::allocator, or do so manually. Ex:void * ptr = ::operator new(sizeof(SomeClass));SomeClass * some_object = new (ptr) SomeClass();This is in contrast to allocating and constructing an object in one step. Ex:SomeClass * some_object = new SomeClass();;  thanks :)   