I think the key phrase is that "he didn't say where on that list they fall". I'll bet somewhere really low on such a list, an "mIRC compiler" is also present. Realistically though, we will probably never see this.
Emoticons are also slightly different, because they would likely be part of a bigger functionality that allowed embedding of images inside channel windows, something that is actually needed and related to the functioning of mIRC as it exists now. A compiler would be completely tangential to mIRC as an IRC client. I think that speaks for itself as to its place.
