Ruta: Relevance/Purpose of GATHER

Hi.

This is just a question for clarification on the functionality of action GATHER. As far as I can tell, it creates a new annotation of the given type, spanning the matched annotation of the given rule elements and allows to assign them to the features of the created annotation.

But how is this different from the CREATE action? I'd argue that the latter can do the same and more, which would render GATHER irrelevant. Just by using LabelExpressions instead of NumberExpressions as arguments:

A B{-> GATHER(C, 1, 2, "a" = 1, "b" = 2)};
// VS
x:A y:B{-> CREATE(C, 1, 2, "a" = x, "b" = y)};

Some clarification would be great. Thank you.

Best, Michael