mIRC appears to support UTF-16 and not just USC-2, which enables us to paste unicode characters that are mapped in higher planes than the Basic-Multilingual-Plane (BMP) of 0000-FFFF. It's also true that Regex readily handles these higher plane characters. But mIRC's $asc(), $chr(), $len() etc functions do not.

$utfencode() and $utfdecode() do already seem to support these characters.

Why? Several web-based and mobile device IRC clients support Emoji, and there is no practical means for mIRC scripts to "see" and interpret them.


Well. At least I won lunch.
Good philosophy, see good in bad, I like!