R devel - Mar 2003 - order of package loading and printing messages to console on startup

Recently in R-devel, I've noticed that when I start up R, code in
.Rprofile (in the working directory) gets sourced but any messages printed
out by that code (e.g. by `cat') are printed *before* the introductory
statement about R.

For example, if I put the line

library(KernSmooth)

in my .Rprofile file, I get

artemis:> R
KernSmooth 2.22 installed
Copyright M. P. Wand 1997

R : Copyright 2003, The R Development Core Team
Version 1.7.0 Under development (unstable) (2003-03-04)

R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type `license()' or `licence()' for distribution details.

[...]
>
I assume this is because of the order in which packages are loaded.  I was
wondering if this behavior is desired?  I couldn't find anything in
?Startup.

Obviously not a critical issue but it seems a bit odd. Of course, if I
wrap everything with a call to .First() in my .Rprofile file, then the
package gets loaded last and the corresponding messages are printed last.  

I'm using
> version
         _                           
platform i686-pc-linux-gnu           
arch     i686                        
os       linux-gnu                   
system   i686, linux-gnu             
status   Under development (unstable)
major    1                           
minor    7.0                         
year     2003                        
month    03                          
day      04                          
language R                           


-roger
_______________________________
UCLA Department of Statistics
rpeng@stat.ucla.edu
http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~rpeng

What's changed is when the introductory message is printed, not when code 
in .Rprofile is run:

revision 1.118
date: 2003/02/26 15:51:17;  author: pd;  state: Exp;  lines: +6 -6
RNG change + delayed greeting

So it was intentional, but Peter D will have to explain why (as I wasn't
paying attention).

The profiles are run quite early (before the default packages are loaded)
and I think it is preferable to use .First to load packages (now the
system no longer makes use of it for that purpose).

On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Roger Peng wrote:
> Recently in R-devel, I've noticed that when I start up R, code in
> .Rprofile (in the working directory) gets sourced but any messages printed
> out by that code (e.g. by `cat') are printed *before* the introductory
> statement about R.
[...]

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595