An instrument I/O assistant and the algorithms that may be used to manage instrument responses and that may provide an instrument-centric approach to message-based instrument I/O. The instrument I/O assistant may assist the user in parsing instrument responses by offering an environment to interact with an instrument response without forcing the user to write parsing code. Embodiments may be integrated into instrumentation control programs to make instrument I/O as transparent as possible. The instrument I/O assistant may provide code generation so that the parsing of an instrument response performed in the instrument I/O assistant can be reused. The saved code for one query and response may be referred to as a query block. Two or more query blocks may be saved into a task. A task is a series of executable query blocks. The task may be executed, or alternatively code may be generated to execute the task.