[Rd] Last line in .Rprofile must have newline (PR#4056)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Why do you think this a bug in R?  All source files should end in the EOL
character: R command lines are incomplete without it (or a semicolon) and
this is covered by the standard rules.  (It also happens at the command
line, BTW.)

That we have worked around the user error in a number of places does not
make it a bug elsewhere.  Files such as .Rprofile are handled at a much
lower level than source(), and the convenience of the connections
mechanism (which allows non-native line endings for example, as well as
incomplete last lines) is not available.

For your reference, it is the behaviour of R_ReplFile in src/main/main.c
on PARSE_EOF that matters.

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003 hb at maths.lth.se wrote:

> Full_Name: Henrik Bengtsson
> Version: R v1.7.1
> OS: WinXP Pro, Solaris 9
> Submission from: (NULL) (130.235.2.229)
> 
> 
> A colleague of mine who is new to R had problems setting up his .Rprofile and we
> tracked it down to the following. On both WinXP and Solaris with Rv1.7.1 we
> noticed that the *last* line in .Rprofile has to have a *newline* to be
> evaluated. For instance, starting R with the following .Rprofile:
> 
>  a <- 1 <newline>
>  b <- 2
> 
> will only set the variable 'a'. Adding a newline to the second line will set 'b'
> too. FYI: I browsed through ?.Rprofile and R-intro.html to see if it was
> document, but it does not seem so. I also checked with the behavior of source()
> too, but there a newline is not required. 
> 
> Best wishes
> 
> Henrik Bengtsson
> Lund University
> 
> > str(R.Version())
> List of 11
>  $ platform: chr "sparc-sun-solaris2.9"
>  $ arch    : chr "sparc"
>  $ os      : chr "solaris2.9"
>  $ system  : chr "sparc, solaris2.9"
>  $ status  : chr ""
>  $ major   : chr "1"
>  $ minor   : chr "7.1"
>  $ year    : chr "2003"
>  $ month   : chr "06"
>  $ day     : chr "16"
>  $ language: chr "R"
> 
> > str(R.Version())
> List of 11
>  $ platform: chr "i386-pc-mingw32"
>  $ arch    : chr "i386"
>  $ os      : chr "mingw32"
>  $ system  : chr "i386, mingw32"
>  $ status  : chr ""
>  $ major   : chr "1"
>  $ minor   : chr "7.1"
>  $ year    : chr "2003"
>  $ month   : chr "06"
>  $ day     : chr "16"
>  $ language: chr "R"
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> 
> 

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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