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On Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 07:31:49AM -0800, G. Ken Holman wrote: > At 2004-03-23 08:38 -0600, Bill Riegel wrote: > >What to look thru a listOfNodes, and set contents on a variable, foundIt, > >when I found what I am looking for, then break. > > XSLT does not work this way ... the semantics for an <xsl:for-each> are > different than a programmer's "for loop". To amplify on that a little... "for-each" can be read as saying, make a sequence in which each element is the result of a single evaluation of this contained expression for every matching item. In functional programming terms it's a mapping from one sequence to another. An XSLT engine does not need to evaluate the for-each in any particular order -- all that matters is that the results are generated in the appropriate order. This is similar to a C compiler optimising by changing expression evaluation order, and is not usually noticeable unless you start using things with side effects (e.g. ++j * ++i + --i * --j might or might not do what you expect in C) I hope this helps. But it really is a different way of thinking about things. Liam -- Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/
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