[Tutor] what does the "@" operator mean?

[Paul McGuire]

> By the way, (totally off-topic, of course, my apologies): what do all
> y'all call the "@" operator?

Back when the "what syntax should we use for decorators?" debate raged, this
symbol was referred to as a "pie", I guess because it looks like the swirl
on top of a cream pie.  I think this term is of Perl/Unix-y origin, similar
to "bang"(!), "splat"(*), and "hash"(#).  

I much prefer the "spidermonkey" or "sleepycat" terms, though.
Unfortunately, here in the US, far fewer would understand what I was saying
than if I called it the prosaic "at-sign" (so named because on old-style
store receipts, one might find "3 apples @ 5 cents", meaning "at the unit
price of" or just "at" for short).

Use of "dot" and "star" for "." and "*" are fairly commonplace now, in place
of their older forms "period" and "asterisk".  Did you ever hear anyone say
"go to 'www period google period com'"?  But it is interesting that the
clunky "ampersand" persists.

Perhaps as we move forward into the unicode world, we will have to have more
names for symbols like "§" and "¶".  My Windows character map names these
(when mousing over them) as the "section sign" and "Pilcrow sign".  "@" is
referred to here as the "Commercial At", and "#" as the "Number sign",
although all of us have probably been instructed by voice mail menus to
press the "pound key" when they mean this sign.  Much more good info on all
this trivia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation.

-- Paul
Mary love to wear her skates/Upon the ice to frisk/Wasn't she a silly
girl/Her little * ?