Jeni's Musings

It’s true that if you’re going to immediately query into or re-process the nodes you’ve just created then you’ll want to be able to get at them through a function. I seem to remember that in FXSL you do that with the wrappers you use around sequences-of-sequences?

But in the majority of transformations, new nodes will be composed with element constructors rather than being used in expressions or patterns, so there’s no requirement to use a function to create them. (That’s not to say that you can’t then re-process the nodes, just that the nodes get stored in a temporary tree first.)

Anyway, these are just my rules of thumb, made to be broken (the rules, that is, not my thumbs).