Semiconductor & Computer Engineering
The mIRC Scripting Language, abbreviated as mSL, is an event-driven, procedural scripting language embedded inside the mIRC client. mSL's main feature is its seamless ability to interact with other IRC client on IRC in order to perform certain tasks.
Although widely used to make bots to automatically manage a channel, it can also be used to create: basic games, small functions and macros, play music, and even operate small applications. mIRC scripts are stored in plain text files (.mrc) or as INI files. With the aid of com scripts and dlls mIRC can be used to automate just about everything in the Windows environment.
History
mIRC was first created in 1994 in order to solve the main issues that hunted some of the earlier clients such as steep learning curve and limited a feature set[1]. Khaled Mardam-Bey released the first public version of mIRC in 28th of February, 1995[1]. The scripting language grew as commands were added on an ad-hoc basis. Originally only commands that were directly related to IRC were added, however this slowly changed as the need for more customization grew.
Throughout the 3.0 - 4.0 versions, mSL grained most of the syntax we know today. Because of the ambiguous nature of the language such as no real tokens, the use of sigils was introduced in order to distinguish meaningful tokens from plain text tokens. The '$' sigil was introduced to indicate the token is an identifier. The language gained some traction when variables were added in version 4.0[2]. The concatenation operator was added in version 4.1. One of the largest updates to the language took place in version 4.5 which brought evaluation brackets, aliases in remote, goto statements, string manipulation identifiers, if statements and operators, as well as variable assignment arithmetics. 4.6 to 5.0 brought a stream of new identifiers and commands to perform more complex operations.
Version 5.0 introduced new custom windows. In 5.3 sockets and picture windows were introduced which allowed scripts to have a graphical user interface. In version 5.5 dialogs were added which allowed native-looking components to be added onto a window.
Version 7.0 of mIRC brought Unicode support into the language.
