// this is the "item" that will be returned by the TupleIterator.
// In general it is actually a sequence, so we wrap it in an ObjectValue
// It subsequently gets unwrapped by the MappingFunction applied to the
// output of the SortedTupleIterator.
for (int n=1; n<=comparators.length; n++) {
ValueRepresentation v = tuple[n];
if (v instanceof Closure) {
v = ((Closure)v).reduce();
}
if (v instanceof EmptySequence) {
nodeKeys[k+n] = null;