Yesterday I got involved in a question to handle a list of input documents where there is a start value and for every other element this start value has to be increased until an end value is reached.

In more advanced XSLT cases you may end up in a situations that aren't solvable using a for-each. Why not? Well, in the for-each you can't iteratively re-calculate a variable. Like a program language as Scala, XSLT is in fact a so called 'functional' language. Maybe not in the strict sense of the definition (I haven't checked), but one of the definitions is that in a functional language, or at least in Scala, variables are immutable. In XSLT once assigned a value, a variable cannot be changed. So a variable in XSLT is only variable at first assignment.

How to solve this? Well, with recursion. This morning I googled on XSLT and recursion and found this nice explanation.

Recursion is a paradigm in which a certain object or functionality is repeated by itself.

In computer programming this is done by defining a function with a specific implementation of functionality and where before of after that implementation the function calls itself with an altered set of input values until a certain end-condition is reached. It's one of the first computer algorithms I learned in a language as Pascal. And a typical example is calculating the factorial of a natural number.

I use recursion in XSLT regularly, for instance in a template that replaces a string in an another string until all occurrences have been replaced. I wrote about that in 2010 already.

In this blog post I'll omit providing an example, since I already provided a few in the articles linked above. I just want to draw your attention to this concept in XSLT. But if you like to read more on XSLT and recursion, you might be interested in this blog article.