.emacs not being loaded in emacs-lisp mode

Hi! [please CC me, i'm not on the list] I sadly noticed that my .emacs file was load only in "fundamental" mode when editing it. Digging through, I noticed that the default .emacs entry in auto-mode-alist is: ("[/\\][._].*emacs\\'" . emacs-lisp-mode) I don't understand the first []. Why the need for a / or \ before the .emacs? Is this setup the default behavior? Adding the following in my .emacs fixed it: (setq auto-mode-alist (append auto-mode-alist '(("\\.emacs\\'" . emacs-lisp-mode)))) It works. Why isn't *that* the default? The version is: 21.1 (patch 9) "Canyonlands" XEmacs Lucid on Windows NT, installed from binary. Thank you, have a nice day! A. -- La sémantique est la gravité de l'abstraction.