While going through and updating some scripts to use the new features
that were recently added to hist(), I found myself very confused by
the align keywords - I had to go and look at Manuel Metz's post a
couple weeks ago to believe it wasn't a typo in the documentation...
"center" and "edge" are exactly the opposite of what one would have
thought (as he noted)... I've attached a diff of my proposed solution
- accepting the old keywords for backwards-compatibility, but have the
documentation only mention two keywords that make more sense ('left'
and 'mid').
I've added two other features as well - for some of the histograms I'm
making, it makes sense to have plots that are cumulative from the left
instead of the right - with this patch, that's allowed by passing in
cumulative=-1 (or anything else that is less than 0 - True still
operates the way it did before). To make this also easier from the
perspective of how some might want the histogram to look, I've also
added a 'right' option to the 'align' keyword.
Hopefully these changes will now satisfy all possible uses that anyone
can imagine for a histogram. 
erikhistadd.diff (3.37 KB)
Erik Tollerud wrote:
While going through and updating some scripts to use the new features
that were recently added to hist(), I found myself very confused by
the align keywords - I had to go and look at Manuel Metz's post a
couple weeks ago to believe it wasn't a typo in the documentation...
"center" and "edge" are exactly the opposite of what one would have
thought (as he noted)... I've attached a diff of my proposed solution
- accepting the old keywords for backwards-compatibility, but have the
documentation only mention two keywords that make more sense ('left'
and 'mid').
I've added two other features as well - for some of the histograms I'm
making, it makes sense to have plots that are cumulative from the left
instead of the right - with this patch, that's allowed by passing in
cumulative=-1 (or anything else that is less than 0 - True still
operates the way it did before). To make this also easier from the
perspective of how some might want the histogram to look, I've also
added a 'right' option to the 'align' keyword.
Hopefully these changes will now satisfy all possible uses that anyone
can imagine for a histogram. 
Hi Erik,
yup - the keywords are currently _very_ misleading. I guess the original reason for these keywords was that they were just passed to the bar/barh method. Now that hist() was updated I thought about changing/adapting the align keyword, but didn't manage to get this in before 0.98 was released 
Your suggestions look good to me ...
Manuel