[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #49400] plot() ignores "defaultaxesbox" property

[Pantxo Diribarne]

Follow-up Comment #2, bug #49400 (project octave):

@Martin: don't reply from your mail client or your answers are not visible in
the bug tracker. Pasting here your answer.

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Martin wrote:
Thanks for the explanation. The MATLAB behaviour seems strange to me,
but I see that doing the same in Octave is the right choice from a
compatibility point of view.

However, plot() ignoring a default box "off" is quite surprising for the
user. The way I discovered it was that

figure()
plot(1:10)

and

figure()
hold on
plot(1:10)
hold off

produced different results.
Would you mind adding a note to the help of plot() that tells the user
about this feature? Some users will not even be aware of the "box"
property, so mentioning it enables those users to get consistent plot
appearance. 
---------------------------------------------------------

I'd say that this is expected (but would probably be worth a test in ML): when
using "hold on" prior to plot, you create a default axes (as none was
existing) and retain it for further plots (its "nextplot" property is set to
"add").

As for documenting that high level plotting functions sometimes (often)
override defaults (for the main object and for its parent axes), what would
you propose since not only "plot" but many other function do that?


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