[Will]

In my experience, "@" prepends "tool" commands, mostly for building and creating. It's a syntax convention that has been adopted by lots of folks who use the MOO platform because players in their games are allowed to build areas and create objects. But the use of "@" in commands is not native to LambdaMOO. People have chosen to do it for their own reasons, but it's not part of the platform. We chose LambdaMOO because it looked like the most stable, dynamic code base out there, and used it to build a game where players play and the staff creates the world--with zero @ commands on the player side.