unwarranted warning from hist.default (PR#9356)

deepayan.sarkar at gmail.com writes:

x = rnorm(100)
b = seq(min(x) - 1, max(x) + 1, length = 11)
b

 [1] -3.4038769 -2.7451072 -2.0863375 -1.4275678 -0.7687980 -0.1100283
 [7]  0.5487414  1.2075111  1.8662808  2.5250506  3.1838203

invisible(hist(x, breaks = b, include.lowest = TRUE, plot = FALSE))

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.

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.