Please don't feel offended,
Not at all! :-)
but again I must say you are thinking a programming way, but the sitemap is declarative. It just does not work this way.
If I were trying to do something iterative or stateful, yes... but all I'm really after is not a variable — as in an in imperative language — but rather a name binding (like XSLT "variables", which are really constants). Renaming semantics are a useful convenience in declarative systems. It's such a universal concept in computing that I didn't think I needed a real "problem" to ask about it :-) (although I just saw a reply from another poster that suggests that my language: "refer to it later" was vague and lends itself to a different interpretation, viz. that of explicit state to be read from somewhere else, like a different pipeline, or whatever).
If I knew you already have XSLT background ...
Yes, indeed, if you only wanted to use that in XSLT way, it's not programmatic. But variables in XSLT is not more than convenience, is it? You just store something to reuse it more often or to shorten an expression. Now comparing it to the sitemap what do you want to store here? What has to be simplified? There are no "calculations" in it - besides the input modules where you can also use XSLT functions like translate() or similar. So IMO the usefulness is more limited than in XSLT, you do not really need it, do you?
Joerg
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