| This is for historic reasons - the split function has been doing this since the very start. If this is changed it will need to be changed on a major version boundary as results will be different. The change would need some kind of deprecation - which is tricky as it would be for every call to split where it is given a string. Users would need to convert to regexp to avoid the deprecation, then once the major release takes place the function would stop turning strings into regexp. Alternatively, an option (use_as_string Bool) could be added to the function to tell it what to do - i.e. without option it would be backwards compatible. This would be trivial to add and can be added in any version. |
