Why are there various commands whose names are only diffrentiated by their ending numbers?

Coding
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For example, Mel, as well as Python, documentation has a entry for:

What does this even mean? Are the commands incremented to signify old/new commands?

Are these names suggesting newer bevel commands with improved performance/algorithms and so the numbering is just an attempt preserve the old bevel commands?

If this is so, which commands are the legacy ones? is polybevel the modern bevel command or it is polyBevel3?

I am essentially looking for way to tell which command is the “modern, should be used from here on”, I have come across a few commands named this way.

Am on Maya 2025

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It’s just that Mel is a dinosaur language and has no easy way to offer variable function signatures— if you want to offer different ways to call the functions you need to make additional procedures, usually they just call the base one with some long ugly string of arguments

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The only one I’m sure does different things is filedialog2 which is a actually different

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I would have never guessed that one lol, good to know for sure! thank you.

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to signify old/new commands?

This.

polyBevel and polyBevel3 even have different attributes.

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By the lame standards of consumer software Maya does a great job of maintaining backward compatibility – they have to b/c so many studios have two decades of Maya code to maintain. So if a function has a new signature it has to be a new name,

And they aren’t that creative with the names.