The Python IRC library is intended to encapsulate the IRC protocol at a
quite low level.  It provides an event-driven IRC client framework.  It
has a fairly thorough support for the basic IRC protocol, CTCP and DCC
connections.

The main features of the IRC client framework are:

  * Abstraction of the IRC protocol.
  * Handles multiple simultaneous IRC server connections.
  * Handles server PONGing transparently.
  * Messages to the IRC server are done by calling methods on an IRC
    connection object.
  * Messages from an IRC server triggers events, which can be caught
    by event handlers.
  * Reading from and writing to IRC server sockets are normally done
    by an internal select() loop, but the select()ing may be done by an
    external main loop.
  * Functions can be registered to execute at specified times by the
    event-loop.
  * Decodes CTCP tagging correctly (hopefully); I haven't seen any
    other IRC client implementation that handles the CTCP specification
    subtilties.
  * A kind of simple, single-server, object-oriented IRC client class
    that dispatches events to instance methods is included.
  * DCC connection support.