What happened to floating point literals that start with a dot?

While we're complaining about syntax changes...

We use irb as an interactive command shell in our application.

Users (used to) enter lots of commands like:

Syringe.to   .2   #milliliters

Now, they will have to get used to:

Syringe.to  0.2  #I guess

Ruby versions after 1.6.8 dropped support for the leading . float literals.
But, the current parsers always seem to be able to recognize them and
complain in a meaningful way.

Our users are not programmers.  They don't have
much sympathy for syntactical nuance.  They will say:
  I can do it in Excel, so why can't I in Ruby?

So, why was this (intuitive) form of the float literal dropped?

What would likely break if I patched the parser to quietly
accept the leading dot floats?

I'm not worried about language compatibility here because
these are commands quickly entered in an interactive shell.

Is there some new syntax being planned that will lead to
an ambiguity if leading dot float literals are allowed?

-- 
 Brent Roman
 Software Engineer                 Tel: [phone]
 425 Clinton St., Santa Cruz,      California, 95062
 mailto:[e-mail]  http://www.mbari.org/~brent