Yeah, the command character switching is a good point...although I'm sure the vast majority of people leave it as /, I guess that means omitting the / in scripts does make it SLIGHTLY more compatible.

And yeah, the . prefix is only to make fewer things appear locally. It's good for some private /notices or /msgs that are script triggered (especially auto-identify. Something about seeing my password appear on the screen bugs me. :P). Also useful for /timer and file handling commands (/fopen and the rest) because nobody really wants to see hundreds of /fwrite notices outside of debugging. ;]