[EvilTerran]

That's an interesting idea on the custom error handler, I wasn't aware that those trigger regardless of @s.

I guess a lot of the trouble with @ is that it affects everything that happens temporally-within the expression, but people often use it as if it only affects everything syntactically-within it... for instance, recently I came across something like:

    // suppress warning for <2 results
    @list ($foo, $bar) = returns_a_list(...);

... which would also hide any warnings that occur in the body of returns_a_list(), despite that being neither intended nor wanted.

It's a shame the only @-free solutions to many popular uses of @ (like that one) are so hideously ugly. Also that I suspect that changing @ so it only affected syntactically-contained errors would be... impractical for the PHP team, for a number of reasons.