Stop using the error control operator on filesystem calls (e.g. @unlink())

I just wasted half a dozen hours trying to debug why my module's stream wrapper tests were suddenly dying with no output, only to discover that the mysterious silent death was coming from Drupal core's use of the @ operator. I had a typo in my code, which should have caused PHP to throw a nice, descriptive fatal error before dying... but instead PHP said absolutely nothing, and still died.

As you can see in the attached file, core uses the error control operator on over 170 filesystem calls (unlink(), fread(), copy(), etc.), and a few other types of calls. I would like to request that the @ operator be replaced with proper exception handling, so that module authors like myself who are developing stream wrappers don't get bitten by this overpowering language feature.