37.7 Instances

Objects are relatively heavy weight. To be able to create efficiently light weight objects, we introduce the notion of instances. An instance is an object with restricted capability. It is created from an object that is considered its class. It gets a copy of the attributes of its class. These can be modified by get/1 and set/1. An instance cannot be a class for other instances. Instances are in general very efficient, both in space and access/modification time. The attribute '$class'/1 will store the identity of the class of the instance including parameters.