On Fri, 28 Aug 2009, András Murányi wrote:

So for me to understand, we have them both because we don't have Number2 by
default with Vanilla, did i understand right?

Number2 ([nbx]) is in vanilla since 2001 or so.

Number2 exists because it comes from an external library that was merged into vanilla back then.

Number1 still exists because Number2 isn't backwards-compatible with Number1 and so can't actually replace it. Number2 couldn't be made backwards-compatible anymore because it was already used by those who started pd with -lib iemgui.

Actually, a special constructor could have been made for that case, similar to how [hradio] and [vradio] also exist as [hdl] and [vdl], but there's also a big mismatch of options between Number1 and Number2, such that it isn't really easy to merge Number1 and Number2 without making a more complicated whole with even more options.