>I want a program that can easily implement a protocol; for example,
>PC sends "/p", device responds with a sequence of bytes, which are
>translated by the program into pairs of tab-separated words, with a
>carriage return behind each pair.

What kind of words ? Under any Unix you have a lot of tools that can do
such things. One of them is od, another would be awk. It is also trivial
to write C (using lex or flex) or Perl or other script code to do that.

Peter

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