The return of the static variable (or constant?)

[xatapult]

At one of our last meetings we decided against static variables. The argument was that you could simply use static options for this.

This leads to non-intuitive code. I often create variables/names for magic values in pipelines and/or libraries. The only way to do this now is to add static options. But they're not options... I have no intention to ever change them from the outside. Even stronger: I want them definitely to be absolutely immutable! Doing this by adding static options feels like a (dirty) trick. So from a software-engineering point of view I don't think this was a good decision.

There are of course several ways we can solve this:

• Re-instate static variables. You can even do this as (almost) "syntactic sugar": it will be "just" a static option, with the only difference you can't set it.
• Add <p:constant name="..." as="..." select="..."/>. Very clear what is meant. But: maybe not a good idea, because there is no such thing as a "constant" in XSLT/XPath. Variables are already constant. XQuery however has something resembling constants (variables in the prolog).