Well, in this particular example, that doesn't change a
lot.

But there are cases where the generated content will
not be the same, depending on the content of the sequence
itself.  Read through the B'5.7 "Sequence Constructors", this
is very useful, interesting and well, required to write
XSLT

 For an example:
   <xsl:transform
        xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
        version="2.0">
     <xsl:output indent="yes" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>
     <xsl:variable name="v" as="element()+">
        <elem>1</elem>
      </xsl:variable>
     <xsl:variable name="s" select="
          $v/text(), 'a', $v/text()"/>
     <xsl:template match="/">
        <sequence>
          <xsl:sequence select="$s"/>
        </sequence>
        <value-of>
          <xsl:value-of select="$s"/>
        </value-of>
      </xsl:template>
   </xsl:transform>
should produce:
   <sequence>1a1</sequence>
    <value-of>1 a 1</value-of>

 I say "should" because I've really evaluated the example
with Saxon and got instead:
   <sequence>1a1</sequence>
    <value-of>1 a1</value-of>
 So I reread B'5.7.2 and I can't understand how this result
is build.  Seems like a bug to me, while it would be very
surprising to still find this kind of bug in Saxon.
Michael?

--
/M:D