I've forgotten, why is box("") the default?

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 15:02:13 +0100, "Simon Fear"
<Simon.Fear at synequanon.com> wrote :

Not helped by my typo and being in a rush!

It's true that plot.default and surely many others do a box, since 

par("bty")

[1] "o"

But this isn't what happens if you do things via axis() ...
(see first example in help(axis)).

I suspect it's just done that way for programming convenience.  Since
it's hard or impossible to delete a line once drawn, axis draws the
minimal sensible one; if you want more, you use box() to draw it.

Duncan Murdoch