For the lines
, points
and text
methods the formula
should be of the form y ~ x
or y ~ 1
with a left-hand
side and a single term on the right-hand side. The plot
method
accepts other forms discussed later in this section.
Both the terms in the formula and the …
arguments are
evaluated in data
enclosed in parent.frame()
if
data
is a list or a data frame. The terms of the formula and
those arguments in …
that are of the same length as
data
are subjected to the subsetting specified in
subset
. A plot against the running index can be specified as
plot(y ~ 1)
.
If the formula in the plot
method contains more than one term
on the right-hand side, a series of plots is produced of the response
against each non-response term.
For the plot
method the formula can be of the form
~ z + y + z
: the variables specified on the right-hand side are
collected into a data frame, subsetted if specified, and displayed by
plot.data.frame
.
Missing values are not considered in these methods, and in particular
cases with missing values are not removed.
If y
is an object (i.e., has a class
attribute)
then plot.formula
looks for a plot method for that class first.
Otherwise, the class of x
will determine the type of the plot.
For factors this will be a parallel boxplot, and argument
horizontal = TRUE
can be specified (see boxplot
).
Note that some arguments will need to be protected from premature
evaluation by enclosing them in quote
: currently this is
done automatically for main
, sub
and xlab
. For
example, it is needed for the panel.first
and panel.last
arguments passed to plot.default
.