Re: Working around immutable variables

Read up on "grouping".  That is the declarative
way to do what you want to do, rather than the
imperative approaches you've described as
considering.  With grouping you don't need any mutable variables.

For many imperative programmers, wrapping one's
head around the declarative style can be
challenging, but it sure is rewarding when finally understood!

... and there is an entire section on the many
kinds of grouping available when using XSLT.

Hello,

We have a for-each loop that constructs a
table.  The first column is a region that would
normally look like the following  we would like
to show the firstt region name only to avoid repetition.

US
US
US
US
Europe
Europe
Europe
Asia
Asia

My non-xsl mind wants to use a mutable variable:
   * initialize a variable $current_region to bb
   * loop through each row
   * If current rowbs region column
COLUMN[@name=bregionb] does not equal $current_region then:
       * select the region so it shows in the table
       * reassign $current_region to the string
value of the current rowbs region column

Perhaps comparing the current category to the preceding-sibling?

Perhaps a loop on select=bdistinct_values to
find region names, enclosing aanother loop that
goes through each distinct regionbs rows?  If
position()=1 worked in that context perhaps this would work?

Webre aware of the saxon namespace that allows
for the mutable variable cheat, but would like to avoid this.

I would greatly appreciate your recommendations.

Thank you,
David Jacopille
Boston

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