R- pareto chart grouping like histogram

I need to create a Pareto chart in R. From the example of "qcc" library I need to do grouping before:

let's suppose my table is:

defect <- data.frame(a=c(8, 7, 6, 4, 3, 3, 3, 0, 0, 1))

If a do a histogram I get the grouping automatically

hist(defect$a, breaks=c(-1:8))

But with a pareto graph I don't:

pareto.chart(defect$a, ylab = "Error frequency")

Is there a way to get the grouping and the chart without having to group it with ddply? I need to get the same result of the following, but without having to group it manually.

bb<-ddply(defect$a, .(a), count)
pareto.chart(bb$a, ylab = "Error frequency")

From the documentation it seems pretty clear that the pareto.chart function expects summarized data. If you don't want to use ddply() you could use the base table() function

pareto.chart(table(defect$a), ylab = "Error frequency")