Ordering of result columns

Hi there, I discovered to my horror that in INFORMIX, when I do a select statement, the default ordering of result is by the time of insertion of records and not by the order of the columns specified unless I explicitly specifying so. Does anyone know if there's any configuration environment variables which I can set to order by column keys by default so that I don't have to change all my select statements (which I have thousands of) to have the order by keyword? Regards, Wan-Ling