Program Abstraction and Instantiation

Abstract

When confronted with a new task, a human often recognizes some measure of resemblance between it and another, previously accomplished, task. Rather than “reinvent the wheel,” he is prone to conserve effort by adapting the known solution of the old problem to the problem now at hand. Then, after having solved several related problems, he might come to formulate a general paradigm for solving that type of problem by highlighting the shared aspects of the individual instances and suppressing their inconsequential or idiosyncratic particulars. This process of formulating a general scheme from concrete instances is termed abstraction; that of applying an abstract scheme to a particular problem is termed instantiation.