[ESS] confusion with Perl and R-mode in XEmacs

[Stephen Eglen]

Dear Alex, thanks for the bug report.

I've just tried changing the alist entry to:
   ("^r$" . r-mode)

but it doesn't work.  The relevant function which checks
interpreter-mode-alist is set-auto-mode which does the following:

	    done (assoc (file-name-nondirectory mode)
			interpreter-mode-alist))

so the alist keys are just keys, and not regexps.

Also, with a simple file 'test1', and no .pl suffix containing:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/perl
----------------------------------------------------------------------

it does go into Perl mode.  This is with emacs 23.2 -- is this an XEmacs
only bug?  Can you check if your proposal (adding regexps to the key)
solves the problem on XEmacs?

thanks, Stephen