Thank you for the replies, Uwe and Marc. These are explanations that make perfect sense. However, shouldn't the behavior of plot.factor include the option of type = "n" for consistency with the default plot function?
Best, Martin On 21 Apr 2012, at 08:18 , Marc Schwartz wrote: > On Apr 21, 2012, at 9:49 AM, Martin Renner wrote: > >> When plotting a numerical vector against a factor, 'type="n"' seems to have >> no affect, e.g. >>> plot (1:10~factor (1:10), type = "n") >> >> looks just like >>> plot (1:10~factor (1:10)) >> >> Plotting a numerical against itself works as expected: >>> plot (1:10, type = "n") >> >> I see the same behavior under debian gnu/linux, Mac OS X, and Win7 (all >> current versions, see below). Is this a bug? >> >> Regards, >> Martin > > > > This has to do with method dispatch. See ?plot.formula, which is the plot > method called you pass a formula, as opposed to passing a vector as in your > third example. > > In this case, ?plot.factor is called when the 'x' part of the formula (RHS) > is a factor. When plot.factor is called, it internally calls ?boxplot and of > course, there is no "type = 'n'" for boxplots, hence it is ignored. > > Regards, > > Marc Schwartz > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
