What would probably be usefull (although i will be slow i guess) is if the $dns identifier could actually return a resolved host. Like this:

var %a = $dns(www.mirc.co.uk) ; %a = ip of the site

And vice versa off course. What do you think about it ?? Usefull or not, worth the trouble programming or not??

i kinda dont think it would be of any use to me ..... altho possibly to u it might can u give an example of how and why ud like to see this??

Well here is an example that I actually saw someone using (he used a dll), he was using an ON ^*:JOIN because he wanted the format to be

[join/#chan] nick (user@host) [IP: ip]

Now sure you can trigger a /dns, and wait for ON DNS, but it would be a lot nicer if you could just $dns(the_users_host)

But, in addition to what was suggested, I'd like to see it go a bit further, IE, $dns(host/ip,N) so if it resolves to multiple IPs you can get a list of all of them (N = 0 would give the # of ips).

how would this work tho for someone not an ircop ??? as most networks mask the host partially?? im not saying i dont think it would be valuable ... i personally just dont see a use for it for the everyday user??

I use $dns (with Resolve.dll) for my bot. The bot is able to resolve hostnames (domains) to IP's in order to query them with sockudp.

I guess it would just resolve to $null?
I'd like to see it implemented too.

Bad idea. It can take several seconds to resolve a host and that is why mirc uses an event for it. Your method would freeze mirc until the host gets resolved.

Yea so? Computers have a wonderful feature known as a "timeout" yea so it will freeze up for 2 seconds... is that a big deal? Not to me at least. When I use the resolve.dll (which also would freeze up) there is no noticable freeze. Yes mIRC has a good reason for using an event, asynchronous dns, but perhaps, in some instance, I want synchronous.

well... think about someone from the posts uses it ON JOIN event, think about a IRC SOCKS/PROXY JOIN/PARTflood .. and resolving all of the ips... i think it would make the things worse. A piece of coding will do the job.
I don't like the idea about the extended $dns .
c ya *

Well there are many other uses for it. And the fact that there is already a popular dll that performs this task proves it is something people want. I know I certainly could find uses for it, maybe you can't, but I'm sure there are other things in mIRC that you (and I for that matter) already consider useless, that doesn't mean they aren't invaluable to someone else.