Travis Griggs <tgriggs at keyww.com> wrote...

>I have never fully understood the use of @ either. I've always figured it had
>some historical significance or was pulled out of some domain I wasn't familiar
>with.

It's historical.

In Smalltalk-72, we were pretty free about replacing a lot of the ascii character glyphs.  @ looked like a center dot (a bit like the Mac's option-8) in that system, which you probably would have liked more.  We just carried it forward to ST-76 and ST-80, even though in ST-80 all of the special glyphs (except return and assignment arrows) got dropped.  And the rest is history ;-).

	- Dan