instantiation

instantiation

[in‚stan·chē′ā·shən]

(computer science)

An external declaration or a reference to another program or subprogram in the Ada programming language.

The deduction of omitted values in a set of data from the known values.

The creation of an object of a specific class in an object-oriented program.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

instantiation

(programming)

Producing a more defined version of some object by replacing variables with values (or other variables).

1. In object-oriented programming, producing a particular object from its class template. This involves allocation of a structure with the types specified by the template, and initialisation of instance variables with either default values or those provided by the class's constructor function.

2. In unification, (as used in logic programming, type checking and type inference), binding a logic variable (type variable) to some value (type).

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