Well, YL used that all over, since the @ tells Smarty (2!) to pass the entire array to the modifier rather than calling the modifier for each element of the array (which leaves you to think about, if this assigned var (at the moment it is passed) is actually an array...). But as 2k11 is used with older S9y < Smarty3 environments too, I left the @ notation here.
The point I wanted to note, using the |formatTime modifier here is much better, since already switching "%e" with "%d" for WIN users, before passing the same to strftime(), which avoids this (..locale) "Bug".