Manipulating history in iniitialization files

[Rafael Laboissiere]

Dear Octave maintainers,

First of all, thanks for your continuing effort in developing Octave.  I
really appreciate it and I regret not having time to maintain the
Octave-related Debian packages anymore.

My question/request today regards the code in src/octave.cc, where I read
the following:

    execute_startup_files ();
    initialize_history (read_history_file);

Is there a strong reason for the order of execution above?  If it was
reversed:

    initialize_history (read_history_file);
    execute_startup_files ();

then the history could be manipulated in startup files, like adding
timestamps or the like.  I have not investigated the possible side
effects of this reversal, though, but it could be a beneficial change.

Cheers,

Rafael Laboissiere