[texhax] "@" : vowel or glottal stop ? (was : Some puzzling TeX)

[Paul Isambert]

Le 24/02/2011 00:09, Martin Schröder a écrit :
> 2011/2/23 Uwe Lueck<uwe.lueck at web.de>:
>> broadcast by River Valley. The script appears in TUGboat
> Shouldn't that be a TUGbo@ ? :-)
>
> I'm wondering: Has anybody ever asked DEK about the choice of @ in one
> of his Q&A's?

As you might have noticed, I'm not DEK. However, here are some 
reasonable hypotheses about the choice of @:

Given ASCII, alternatives are:
- $ and _, but they're already in use for other purposes; same for #, &...;
- The hyphen - is out of the question otherwise dimension assignements 
would be impossible;
- ? and ! are already used in ConTeXt, and probably DEK wanted to make a 
difference;
- The vertical bar | would have been nice, but then its role in 
Indo-European graphemics is far from clear.
- Hence @. QED.

Paul