And here I suspected you were trolling... (in that case, if you've successfully trolled the RFC - more power to you :)

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2812#section-2.2

" 2.2 Character codes

   No specific character set is specified. The protocol is based on a
   set of codes which are composed of eight (8) bits, making up an
   octet.  Each message may be composed of any number of these octets;
   however, some octet values are used for control codes, which act as
   message delimiters.

   Regardless of being an 8-bit protocol, the delimiters and keywords
   are such that protocol is mostly usable from US-ASCII terminal and a
   telnet connection.

   Because of IRC's Scandinavian origin, the characters {}|^ are
   considered to be the lower case equivalents of the characters []\~,
   respectively. This is a critical issue when determining the
   equivalence of two nicknames or channel names."