[ruby-core:24568] Proposal: match? with no backrefs

I was doing some work today to optimize the allocation in certain parts of
Rubygems, and one of the things that bedeviled me was an inability to do a
regex match without generating a bunch of objects. I'd like to be able to
do:
"string".match? (/regex/)

and have that be guaranteed to only allocate 2 objects, and have:

str.match?(regex)

be guaranteed to allocate 0 objects. It makes perfect sense to me that regex
operations in general generate backregs, but it would also seem reasonable
for a method like match? to return a boolean with no side-effects.

Thoughts?

-- 
Yehuda Katz
Developer | Engine Yard
(ph) 718.877.1325