[Rd] unwarranted warning from hist.default (PR#9356)

[Peter Dalgaard]

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.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
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