libhpcalcs: portable (Windows / MacOS X / Linux) connectivity kit library

[debrouxl]

Indeed, the main practical upside of libhpcalcs are its portability and interoperability.
* portability: it's the only way users of MacOS X, Linux and probably FreeBSD + some of its derivatives can communicate with their calculators without relying on Windows. Wine doesn't provide a USB stack.
* interoperability: pretty much every programming language can interoperate with C. Front-ends to the libhpcalcs backend can be written into pretty much any language, either directly (C, C++) or through wrappers which can be auto-generated (SWIG, FFI) for all of the most used programming languages (Python, Lua, Perl, etc.)
Additionally, libhpcalcs is free software (both in beer and in freedom), but it doesn't matter in day to day usage.

The main practical downside of libhpcalcs, for now, is that its usage remains non-graphical, as nobody bothers writing a GUI for libhpcalcs. To me, functionality, portability and interoperability have higher priority than UI work. I don't like doing things in the wrong order


Cristian: have you suppressed the leading metadata from your programs, as I mentioned above ? Seems to work around the problem, until I implement stripping of said metadata.
Transferring .hpprgm files worked for my beta-tester, and other persons later - otherwise, the feature would never have been released