But as it's completely undocumented behaviour there's no guarantee that it will continue to work outside events in future versions of mIRC (although admittedly it's probably unlikely to be removed now for the sake of it). More importantly though, using $() creates non-descriptive code, which is bad practice in general. This becomes particularly apparent when used in conjunction with $+(), which it almost always is in dynamic variable situations such as the one described in this thread, because the two identifiers look so similar and is a common cause of typos going unnoticed.
Hardly worth saving 4 bytes over is it?
