We need a better term

[Murata Makoto <mura034@attglobal.net>]

James,

Thanks for your answer.  Before I respond to technical details, 
I would like to talk about terminology.

> In spec the kind of thing that is matched against a pattern is a pair
> <a, c> where a is an unordered collection of attributes and c is an
> ordered collection of children (see section 2 of the spec).  <a1, c1>
> and <a2, c2> differ only in their character children iff <a1,
> stripChars(c1)> is equal to <a2, stripChars(c2)> where stripChars(c)
> returns the members of c that are not characters.

I have used "hedges" to refer to zero or more trees possiblly prepended, 
interespersed, and followed by characters.  Your <a,c> is more than 
my hedges; it is a hedge together with a collection of attributes.  

You wrote "tree", but it is very misleading.  We need a better term.  
How about "attributed hedge"? 

Cheers,

Makoto