I have a numeric value in my XML and want to use it to control
some processing, say counting up until the number is reached, and
outputting a line in the process.

$ cat xtimes.xml
<Urmel>10</Urmel>

I use recursion and everything works fine. Is recursion the
preferred way to use a number to steer processing in XSL 1.0?

$ cat xtimes.xsl
<xsl:transform version="1.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:output method="text"/>
  <xsl:template match="Urmel"><!-- match element -->
    <xsl:call-template name="rec">
      <xsl:with-param name="iter" select="1"/>
    </xsl:call-template>
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template name="rec"><!-- recursive template -->
    <xsl:param name="iter"/>
    <xsl:if test="not( $iter &gt; . )"><!-- Greater than me? -->
      <xsl:value-of select="concat( $iter, '&#10;' )"/>
      <xsl:call-template name="rec"><!-- Then recurse. -->
        <xsl:with-param name="iter" select="$iter + 1"/>
      </xsl:call-template>
    </xsl:if>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:transform>

In order to use xsl:for-each, I'd have to dispose of something
generating a node-set based on my number, wouldn't I?

Or is this misguided optimization thinking in thinking that lots of
template invocations are bad?