RE: [xsl] xsl:script: functions written in XSLT

[Kay Michael <Michael dot Kay at icl dot com>]

> I was wondering about this when I first saw saxon:function : 
> Is there really
> any difference between that and named templates? If not, then 
> why do we need both? 
>
Yes, that worried me too before I introduced saxon:function; my first
thought was to allow some kind of mapping of an XPath function call to a
named template. I came to the conclusion that a named template is a
specialised kind of function whose syntax is designed on the assumption that
its purpose is to construct a tree, and that bending this syntax to allow it
to return other kinds of value would be very messy.

The "two language" approach, XSLT+XPath, with the two languages having very
different syntactic and semantic conventions, is always going to lead to
some boundary problems where the two meet.

Mike Kay

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