I think I made as much sense as your comment about VISA compatible instruments. Outside of serial comm, the physical connections to an instrument are usually pretty hard to make mistakes with (i.e. GPIB). And I have found that over the years, that the number of ways to make mistakes in writing a serial comm program (baud rate, parity, handshaking, data bits, termination, stop bits, etc.) are far greater than the number of ways to make mistakes in cabling.