An occurrence is any instance of an entity in your program. An entity can be any language construct, such as a variable, a routine, or a constant. To further clarify this, consider the following code fragment (not written in a particular language): 1 MODULE myprog; 2 3 VAR i,j; 4 5 ROUTINE foo() 6 BEGIN 7 i = 5; 8 j = i; 9 END; 10 END; The code contains four entities: myprog, foo, i, j. There is one occurrence each of the module myprog, and the routine foo. The variable i, however, has three occurrences, and the variable j has two.