Okay :-) After 30 years of working on mIRC, sometimes it's difficult to remember why a feature was implemented the way it was. I am pretty sure that at one time mIRC did not support spaces in passwords, so sending PASS with one word was fine. When support for spaces in passwords was added later by clients and/or servers, I probably had to decide whether or not to use a colon in PASS. Using a colon could have broken backward compatibility with existing servers at the time. Then again, this is just conjecture. Since I have never received a report of an IRC server having an issue with this, I am a little worried that adding a colon at this point would in effect create an issue where there technically isn't one with the majority of IRCds.
