Is "Universal Construction" a well-known term? I don't recall ever encountering it in my Comp. Sci. degree, and some quick searching only leads me to more academic papers.
I only know them from category theory and abstract algebra. You could think of them as polymorphic constructions from some set of assumptions. As an example, given some type of elements, the type of lists of those elements is a monoid (the free monoid) on those elements.
