Michael Kay wrote:
The
few programming classes I've taken (using procedural
languages) have taught that a lot of global variables are a
Bad Thing, but maybe that axiom doesn't necessarily apply to XSLT.
Global variables are a bad thing in procedural programming because they
can be updated from anywhere, which leads to a lot of errors.
They do no harm in XSLT because they are only evaluated once.
True, but in this case, x seems to be evaluated twice:
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";>
<xsl:variable name="x" select="'hello'"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<result>
<r><xsl:value-of select="$x"/></r> <!-- $x is 'hello' here -->
<xsl:variable name="x" select="'hi'"/>
<r><xsl:value-of select="$x"/></r> <!-- $x is 'hi' here -->
<xsl:call-template name="test"/>
</result>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template name="test">
<r><xsl:value-of select="$x"/></r> <!-- $x is 'hello' here -->
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Explaining to people why that's legal, after telling them they can only
assign x once, is a nice challenge :)
Mike
--
Mike J. Brown | http://skew.org/~mike/resume/
Denver, CO, USA | http://skew.org/xml/
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