[R] par(new=TRUE) vs par(new=FALSE)

[Uwe Ligges]

Dirk Enzmann wrote:

> Just out of curiosity (and I hope that my question does not confuse 
> those who intuitively understood the par(new=TRUE) statement right in 
> the beginning):
> 
> I would like to know whether beginners (learning R) had the same 
> difficulty as I had: Intuitively I thought that par(new=TRUE) would draw 
> a new plot (and not into an already existing plot) and that 
> par(new=FALSE) would not draw a new plot but draw into an already 
> existing plot - opposed to what the par(new=TRUE) statement actually 
> does. (It would be interesting to receive an answer also from those who 
> meanwhile reached an expert status  in working with the R syntax). 
> Perhaps my confusion is due to the fact that I am a trained right-handed 
> that really is a left-handed (those people tend to mistake contrasts).
> 
> If there are a lot of people having this difficulty, I would like to 
> know why the decision was made to define the mode of action of the 
> par(new=TRUE) statement as it is now. Perhaps that helps me to 
> understand better the way programmers tend to think.


This has been defined ages ago in the blue book (maybe in the brown one, 
I don't have it handy), so no chance to redefine. It confuses several 
users, but ?par has the nice explaination:

'new: logical, defaulting to FALSE. If set to TRUE, the next high-level 
plotting command (actually plot.new) should not clean the frame before 
drawing "as if it was on a new device".'

Uwe Ligges



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