I have an embedded system I'm communicating with over serial. The command structure right now is designed to be operated interactively: it displays a prompt, accepts a few commands, and displays results in a human-readable form.
I'm thinking about changing this to a more machine-usable format, so I can talk to it through a MATLAB GUI without too much trouble (right now it's hiccuping on the interactive prompts and varying message lengths, etc.).
So is there a document or standard somewhere that describes how to design a good serial command protocol for your embedded system?