Re: Regular expression functions (Was: Re: [xsl] comments on December F&O draft)

[naha at ai dot mit dot edu]

Quoting Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com>:
[...]
> Is that because constructing *nodes* is expensive or is it the *links*
> between the nodes within a tree that makes things problematic? If the
> latter, then perhaps documentless nodes are a blessing ;) If the
> former, then it's a good argument for nested sequences, so you don't
> have to create nodes to provide structure.
> 
> For example, given the problems that I described about processing x,y
> coordinates as pairs, there's a strong temptation to create pairs of
> coordinates as 'coordinate' elements with 'x' and 'y' attributes,
> rather than a simple sequence of integers. If sequences could be
> nested, I wouldn't feel that temptation.

I expect that in order to allow for nested sequences of <things>, the
data model would have to be extended to allow <things> to be first
class.  As it stands now, how would it know whether when putting togenter
(to use lisp notation) the sequences

    (a b) and (c d)

you meant to get

    (a b c d)

or

    ((a b) (c d))


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