gwyn@Brl.ARPA (VLD/VMB) (05/19/85)
Sounds like you're not exerting enough control over the contract C programmers. Plum-Hall publishes some excellent guideline documents that you could require conformance to. For one's own purposes, Harbison & Steele do a good job of making recommendations for portability in their "C: A Reference Manual". I agree that the default behavior of a C programmer should be to code portably, except when there is a demonstrable problem doing so. Unfortunately, most recent college grads have not been exposed to a wide enough range of systems to really understand what the portability issues are, so they should rely on guidelines published by those who do.