there's no such thing as the "symbol for that variable". `a` and `:a` have (almost) nothing in common (e.g. you can't use :a directly to retrieve a). A Symbol will never automatically turn into a value any more than a String would turn into something else.

And actually, that a very reasonable thing to want:
```julia
x = Polynomial(1, :x)
y = x^2 + 3x + 5
```

See usages of `::Symbol` in `print_with_color`, `normalize_output`, `uv_error`. In these cases, Symbols are used as identifiers like here