the_jos wrote:
> I then found out that xml/xsl does not
> handle variables the way a program language does. But that's not
> entirely strange, given the nature of xsl.

Actually, XSLT handles variables very much the same way other 
nonprocedural programming langauges do -- single-assignment, lexically 
scoped.

> For my question, I just wanted to determine the value of legs (25),
> chair_top (25) and table_top (50) given the price of wood and work.

This is as much a data-representation problem as a stylesheet problem. 
If your data hierarchy matches the structural hierarchy, gathering the 
structured information becomes much easier -- for example, if the data 
is something like

<set>
  	<table quantity="1">
		<top quantity="1" hours="2" wood="2" price="100"/>
		<leg quantity="4" hours="1" wood="1" price="25"/>
	</table>
  	<chair quantity="4">
		<top quantity="1" hours="1" wood="1" price="50"/>
		<leg quantity="4" hours="1" wood="1" price="25"/>
	</chair>
</set>

then this becomes a fairly straightforward recursive 
multiply-and-accumulate problem. (Value at any node is sum of values of 
its children times their quantity, plus its own value if any.) That 
isn't necessarily the best solution; there are several other possible 
ways to structure this.

Note that this provides all the information in a single document. If you 
really wanted to separate the values from the

Picking the minimum of two results is simple once you've got the values, 
of course.


This isn't a typical use of XSLT, of course. It's more typical of what 
one will do using XQuery... but XQuery and XSLT 2.0 are essentially the 
same language with different syntax.


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