As far as I know, there are currently two shortcomings with variable assignment where the variable ends up being set to a value that is not equal to the input value, even when using the -n switch to /set and /var:
The -n switch is specifically for disabling support of mathematical operations.
1) There is no way to assign the two-character sequence "" (i.e., two double quotes) to a variable in any way.
That is because "" is treated as an empty string in core variable-related routines. This was implemented in 1996. Changing this would break scripts that use %var = "" to assign an emtpy value. Currently, if you /set %var "", the "" is converted into an empty value immediately and the variables section shows "%var" and nothing after it. However, if you manually type %var "" into the variables section and then "/echo %var", the "" returns an empty value as well. So the "" conversion is happening at both setting and retrieval. This means that even if a switch was added to /set to mark a variable as an exception to current "" handling, this would break when you next restarted mIRC because the variables file cannot store that information.
We could make the assumption that a scripter would never manually type %var "" into the variables section... in which case a switch, such as -q, could be added to mark a variable as an exception to "" handling.
2) Variable assignment is known to drop any single trailing space character. In contrast: assigning two or more trailing space characters, leading space characters, and a single space character with nothing preceding it, all works fine.
That is because tokenization throughout mIRC is based on spaces. A space after a word is treated as a separator and is lost. Anything after the space is appended with a space between it and the previous word. While /set could be extended to preserve the entire line, this would affect all scripts. If a script has a /set/var/variable assignment that happens to have an unintentional space at the end of the value, that space would be preserved, which could change the way the script works.
A switch could be added, such as -p, that specifically allows this.
