Gentle Reminder: hpprgm

[Kevin Ouellet]

(03-28-2014 10:17 PM)Tim Wessman Wrote:  A gentle reminder to people about the hpprgm extension and others in use in the calculator - these are not plain text files!

I've seen several people now post files labeled with an hpprgm extension when in fact they are plain text. Please remember that hpprgm files are in fact BINARY files and not meant for editing with a text editor. While you can open an exe with a text editor, making changes will cause problems and most likely crashes. The same WILL happen if you are manually tweaking hpprgm files.

When the format changes as new features are added, your programs will confuse people as they try to load them and they fail. The fact that you can currently open them and they seem to show plain text primarily does not mean you should go ahead and edit things.

You have been cautioned and please remember this! For the sake of people in the future getting totally perplexed as to why things aren't working, I'd ask you to keep your plain text source files as source, and only have the hpprgm extension on files that were generated by HP software (or some other specialty program).

When (or if?) Omnimaga re-opens its downloads section to new file uploads, you can be sure that any hpprgm file that is just a plain text file or manually tweaked one will be rejected. I'll be sure to inform the admins about that possible issue. Hopefully Cemetech, TI-Planet and Hpcalc.org do the same.

Also, another issue is when people upload their code on the forums instead of posting a real hpprgm, in many cases the code will not work if copy/pasted into the connectivity kit (or was it when doing so in the emulator?), thanks to the whitespace glitch.