RE: Finding the maximun number of nodes

> Unless your XSL system is particularly smart, the count() version
> will force it to find every such node, so they can be counted,
> but the not() version will allow it to stop after it finds the
> first one.

Saxon does this optimisation (it's not particularly difficult) provided that
the argument to count() is known to be a node-set at compile-time. 

Mike Kay

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