Why does Ruby not Symbol#=~ (regex match operator)?

Question

Ruby doesn\'t automatically stringify symbols when performing a regex match on them, which is easy to do when you have variables containing symbols and you forget that you n

Answer 1

I don't know the reason why it was decided that 1.8 should behave this way, but 1.9 changed in that regard:

>> RUBY_VERSION #=> "1.9.2"
>> :this =~ /./ #=> 0
>> :this =~ /is/ #=> 2