Guys, no need to jump all over this, clean code and defensive programming are solid practices to advocate. "That's just the way we do C" isn't really a good defense to someone trying to point out the warts in the way we do C, even if it did come from K&R.

Its easy to point to this for not sufficiently proving its argument, but its a work in progress, you're not the target audience, and finally, some of the shit in K&R seriously would not pass a code review here, and probably wouldn't where you work either.