Instance

Short note

Note needs to be developed and expanded.

Overview

An instance is a concrete, individual manifestation of a class. In everyday language, it means a true member of a group (an apple is a fruit).

To verb to instance, common in software engineering, means to actively create something in accordance with its class. This could mean, for example. instantiating a software object with data and functionality (object-oriented programming) or instantiating a remote resource (cloud provisioning).

An apple tree could be said to instance members of the fruit class but nobody talks that way.

Instances in generalisation

A generalisation is a statement about a class that applies to all of its instances. For example, the generalisation “all programming languages have syntax” applies to all programming languages.

Related: Generalisation, On ambiguity