tex-wcount.el prot to Xemacs

Hello In Stephen Eglen's collection I found tex-wcount, which counts words of latex file, using the detex program, and displaying the result in the modeline. It uses the timer library and count every N second. However it seems only to work under GNU emacs since it uses timerp which is not defined in xemacs. I find this package nifty and tried to port it, but I don't know enough lisp for this. The author is not reachable any more. I attach the package which is small and would really appreciate if anybody could have a look. Thanks Uwe Brauer