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

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 10:37:16AM +0000, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:

> I have never understood (and continue to fail to understand)
> why, when Don made it quite clear in Plain.TeX that "@" is a
> vowel, Leslie and his followers insist on treating it as
> a glottal stop.  Why one earth did they use the horribly
> ugly :
> 
> 	\@firstofone

Because it's easy to read?

> instead of the far more intuitive and elegant :
> 
> 	\first at fone

What's "fone"?

There is \@ne, thus it must be \firstof at ne? Or
\f at rstofone, or \firstofon@, or ...?

In my taste, \@firstofone is much more clear
than \first at fone. "@" is used for many purposes,
as marker for internal commands, as separator,
as prefix, ..., but using as vowel it's counterintuitive
in my opinion.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko Oberdiek