wishlist: par(ann=FALSE) applied to hist?

Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

On Tue, 12 Aug 2008, Ben Bolker wrote:

par(ann=FALSE) appears to have no effect on
hist.default; it would be nice if it did ...
(boxplot, which plots via bxp, which calls
internal do_title, does -- in a quick search
I can't figure out where the value of ann
takes effect ...)

From the ?par:

     'ann' If set to 'FALSE', high-level plotting functions calling
          'plot.default' do not annotate the plots they produce with
          axis titles and overall titles.  The default is to do
          annotation.

So strictly this is correct, as plot.histogram does not call plot.default. 
The par is only used at R level, as a default for an argument in 
plot.default and never as an in-line parameter.

So I think what you are asking for is a 'ann' argument to plot.histogram, 
which would then be passed down from hist().  The only issue then is if 
par("ann") should set the default, and the current documentation says not.

Does that meet your needs?

 Hmm.   I understand that this isn't a bug (I didn't claim it was) --
the ideal behavior would be for hist() to produce a plot without
annotation when par("ann") was FALSE.  That's distinct from
hist(x,ann=FALSE) [which would be equivalent, I guess, to
hist(x,xlab="",ylab="",main="")], which isn't as useful,

unless the default were set to par("ann") ...
(and yes, I realize that would change user-visible behavior).
This isn't at all necessary, just something that would change
R's behavior in the direction of my naive expectations (which
I might share with other users ... ?)