[variant.variant.general][any.class.general] Replace "instance" with "object"

[frederick-vs-ja]

No description provided.

[tkoeppe]

What is the motivation for this change? We say "an instance of" in many places.

[frederick-vs-ja]

What is the motivation for this change? We say "an instance of" in many places.

This was motivated by the previous PR #8220.

It's a bit confusing to me that most occurrences of "instance" in the standard wording are unrelated to "instantiation". And per #3903, possibly there shouldn't be related one because it's perhaps undesired to refer template specializations as instances. I think it's clearer to say "objects".

[tkoeppe]

This was motivated by the previous PR #8220.

Yes, I expected that. Please see the discussion there: I don't think that one localised fix of wording that was bad in a different way means that we need to change other uses of "instance". I'm happy to see a deeper analysis of this, but it looks to me like a) both phrases ("instance of T" and "object of type T") are fairly widely used, and b) both are reasonable and understandable. At the moment I don't see a pressing need for a change (but we can discuss).

I agree that "instantiation" in the context of templates is probably something that we could clean up (and not just in the standard, but ideally also in the world population at large...).