Re: Language identification

[Juri Linkov]

>     > OTOH, how often do you see a file containg programming language code and
>     > yet without ny extension?
>
>     More often with a non-standard extension than without any extension.
>
> So why not rename the files, or put in -*- lines?

Often this is not possible when files are not under my control.

>     Also there are conflicting extensions like e.g. ".pl" for both
>     Perl and Prolog (esp. SWI-Prolog).
>
> Perhaps we should promote .plg for Prolog.

I'd rather prefer to promote changing the Perl file extension since
Prolog is older than Perl :)  But I think neither is realistic.

Currently I use this hack in .emacs to distinguish between Perl and Prolog:

(add-hook 'find-file-hooks
          (lambda ()
            (when (and (looking-at "#") (string-match "Prolog" mode-name))
              (perl-mode))))

since almost all Perl files begin with a comment, even library files
that have no shebangs.

But I agree such guessing is unreliable.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/