> Furthermore, if i were to build an XSL processor, i would compute
> the cardinality of a set while constructing it, which would make
> count($setvar) O(1) instead of O(card($setvar)) if the variable has
> been evaluated before. This way count($processed) would come for
> free, because the set will have to be constructed in full anyway.

It's not quite as simple as that because some of the ways of constructing a
node-set don't naturally eliminate duplicate nodes, so a processor may
construct a bag of nodes and delay converting it to a set until count() is
called.

I've no idea, of course, if Xalan does this.

Mike Kay

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