Gentle Reminder: hpprgm

[Tugdual]

(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).

Tim, I have mixed feelings when I read your post. On one hand I think it is cool that you share this information. On the other hand I wonder if this is the right customer service. I mean did you wonder why some people would prefer to share hpprgm files rather than source code? You seem to assume that it is a mistake but are we missing a need? I don't have the answer myself but I would be tempted to wonder if there is a need for binaries rather than source code? Like developing a new market? Selling protected maths libs? Not saying that it is desirable, just wondering and wandering...