A declaration giving rise to a class of objects might well have been called an "object class" (in analogy with Hoares record class). In choosing the shorter term "class" we felt that we had a good terminology which distinguished clearly between the declared quantity (the class) and its dynamic offspring (the objects). Our good intentions have not quite worked out, however. Many users tend to use the term "class", or perhaps "class instance", to denote an object, no doubt because "object" does not occur as a reserved word of the language. (As an afterthought, anno 1978, we might have insisted that all class declarations must be prefixed, and defined a primitive outermost prefix "object" containing detach and resume as local procedures. See also (Wang and Dahl 1971)).