The @ is supressing PHP error messages which are not the same as exceptions. You can register an error handler that can throw exceptions, which is what Magento does, but it’s not standard.

Any usage of the @ should include good error checking at the very least. In reality it should prompt a mental refactoring of what you are doing.

Perhaps the answer is a newer differently designed scripting language like ruby, all the benefits of simplicity and a modern OO architecture.

(according to wikipedia, both came about around the same time – who knew…)

I appreciate that this is a very old post, but I thought I’d throw in a clarification for the sake of other folks like me who might stumble across this. PHP wasn’t developed as an OO language so I can see how it might not have made sense to someone with a Java background.

PHP has grown more or less organically from a simple procedural language and, apart from a very limited attempt to introduce OO constructs in PHP4, it wasn’t until PHP5 that most of the things you take for granted appeared. Older language constructs are very slow to be deprecated for reasons of backward compatibility.

So from the viewpoint of writing a simple script on a webpage (which is PHP’s origins) being able to suppress error messages is a good thing. Of course, now we have proper exception handling and all manner of other goodies the @ is a bit vestigial.