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unwarranted warning from hist.default (PR#9356)

2 messages · Deepayan Sarkar, Peter Dalgaard

Original
Deepayan Sarkar
# 
[1] -3.4038769 -2.7451072 -2.0863375 -1.4275678 -0.7687980 -0.1100283
 [7]  0.5487414  1.2075111  1.8662808  2.5250506  3.1838203
Warning message:
argument 'include.lowest' is not made use of in: hist.default(x,
breaks = b, include.lowest = TRUE, plot = FALSE)


I don't think a warning is appropriate, since ?hist says:

include.lowest: logical; if 'TRUE', an 'x[i]' equal to the 'breaks'
          value will be included in the first (or last, for 'right =
          FALSE') bar.  This will be ignored (with a warning) unless
          'breaks' is a vector.

and in this case 'breaks' does qualify as a "vector" by my understanding.

Note that the warning goes away with 'plot=TRUE'. This suggests that
this might have something to do with this vaguely worded entry in the
NEWS for R 2.4.0:

   o   hist(*, plot = FALSE) now warns about unused arguments.

Neither the help page nor the NEWS file indicates what arguments are
considered 'unused' when 'plot = FALSE', but either possibility ---
(1) include.lowest is actually unused and (2) it is used and the
warning is wrong --- is a bug.
R version 2.4.0 Patched (2006-11-03 r39777)
i486-pc-linux-gnu

locale:
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8;LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8;LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8;LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8;LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8;LC_NAME=C;LC_ADDRESS=C;LC_TELEPHONE=C;LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8;LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] "methods"   "stats"     "graphics"  "grDevices" "utils"     "datasets"
[7] "base"

-Deepayan
Peter Dalgaard
# 
deepayan.sarkar at gmail.com writes:
As I read the code, the purpose is to warn people if they supply plot
arguments (density, xlim, ylim,....) while plot=FALSE. There's a stop
list coded by 

        nf <- nf[is.na(match(nf, c("x", "breaks", "freq", "nclass", 
            "plot", "probability")))]

and I think the problem is just that "include.lowest" should have been
on the list.