It's not really a basic feature. Colorizing text, is, by definition, a superficial feature.
Two things:
1. This has been requested before. Multiple times. Your suggestion is noted, but requesting it again isn't going to change much.
2. Regarding your point about "not everybody knows about those 3rd party tools"-- not everybody needs to know. Those who actually care about syntax highlighting will search for it. Presumably you've already googled "mirc syntax highlighting". Let's not insult the intelligence of others by forgetting that they will do the same. Note that the mIRC community is already conditioned to go looking for third party tools, as this is the whole basis of downloading scripts. Users should be aware that mIRC is a fairly "BYOT (tool)" ecosystem. Some people just don't need to bring this tool.
Let's play this feature out with a quick little hypothetical though: let's say Khaled does add syntax highlighting... would this make you write more code? would this make more users start writing mIRC scripts in general?
I personally think the answer to both of those is going to be "no". People don't download mIRC to write scripts, they download it to use IRC, so while it will make scripters lives easier, its not going to cause more people to download mIRC-- it's not even going to cause scripters to write more scripts, since they're presumably writing scripts out of necessity, not the beauty of the editor. All of this means the feature doesn't really add that much value-- Khaled probably understands this, which is why he prioritizes this feature so low.
...and this is coming from the guy who wrote that "syntax highlighting right inside the standard mIRC editor" dll. I don't even use it.
