As others have said, this is fairly common in C++ due to the all-powerful RAII (resource acquisition is initialization) idiom/pattern.
For Java programmers (and maybe C#, I don't know) this will be a foreign concept because heap-based objects and GC kills RAII. IMHO, being able to put objects on the stack is the greatest single advantage of C++ over Java and makes well-written C++ code MUCH cleaner than well-written Java code.
