Hello I a´m doing my master's thesis on Upadting XML.
It's
a bit like the difference between an Integer and an int in Java, though the
analogy isn't perfect.
A
text node has identity, and it has a parent; atomic values such as strings do
not.
If a
function takes a text node as a parameter, the function can do things like
"count how many text nodes in the same tree as this one have the same value as
this text node." If it takes a string as a parameter, you can't do that,
because a string doesn't belong to a tree; and anyway, it's not meaningful to
discuss whether "A" and "A" are the same string, because strings don't have
identity.
Michael Kay
