Profiling Template cross.compare template

Hello,

I was looking at the profiling templates, and I was wondering about
this snippet in cross.compare:

...
  <xsl:if test="contains(concat($sep, $b, $sep), concat($sep, $head,
$sep))">1</xsl:if>
  <xsl:if test="$tail">
    <xsl:call-template name="final.cross.compare">
      <xsl:with-param name="a" select="$tail"/>
      <xsl:with-param name="b" select="$b"/>
    </xsl:call-template>
  </xsl:if>
...

Can anybody explain why these two if statements aren't in a
<xsl:choose> block? If the result string has any characters in it at
all, the element is included, so it makes no difference if the result
is "1" or "1111". As far as I can tell, no other operations are
performed on that result. What is the point of continuing to compare
against the remaining profiles? Is it a performance thing? Just
curious.

Thanks,

-Sam