Re: Language identification

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Stefan Monnier writes:

 > OTOH, how often do you see a file containg programming language code and
 > yet without ny extension?

Extremely frequently.  The great majority that I see are correctly
identified by file(1) (I believe using libmagic), however, by parsing
the shebang.

There are also cases of multiple extensions, where I've seen (for
example) foo.c.inc used for C implementation code that is used in
multiple contexts (perhaps with different behavior according to
#ifdefs).  This would not be recognized by typical Emacs extension
parsing since although it matches something like "\.c\>", it doesn't
match the more usual idioms of "\.c$" or "\.c\'".