cisco enable password vs. enable secret

I've always wondered, what is the point of assigning an enable password and an enable secret on the same cisco device? In my experience, if you assign an enable secret, the basic enable password is not used. I guess a better question would be, why does cisco still offer the less-secure enable password instead of just allowing the enable secret?

I guess that it's a combination of history, backward-compatibility, ease of modifying rather than rewriting a lump of IOS code and leaving the older 'feature' there in case anybody wants to use it