Re: Variables and constants

PS

> Clearly this was an intentional design decision, but it makes it impossible
> to do any kind of simplistic calculation (e.g. totalling a shopping cart
> that has price and quantity information for each item) without resorting to
> recursion.

The fact that some calculations are rather awkward in xslt is not really
due so much to the functional style, as to the fact that the main
`function' expression that you have available, namely the template
returns a result of a type `result tree fragment' that is opaque to the
expression language.

If the restrictions on querying into rtf were not there or
(equivalently) a function is provided to coerce an rtf back to a node
set so that it may be queried, then many things become much simpler.

So here is your basket calculation sans recursion but with xt:node-set

<x>
<thing><quantity> 1</quantity><price> 2</price></thing>
<thing><quantity> 4</quantity><price> 5</price></thing>
<thing><quantity> 3</quantity><price>10</price></thing>
<thing><quantity> 2</quantity><price> 1</price></thing>
</x>


<total xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
       xsl:version="1.0"
       xmlns:xt="http://www.jclark.com/xt"
                >

<xsl:variable name="x">
  <xsl:for-each select="x/thing">
    <a><xsl:value-of select="quantity * price"/></a>
  </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:variable>

<xsl:value-of select="sum(xt:node-set($x)/a)"/>

</total>

xt basket.xml basket.xsl 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<total>54</total>




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