I've heard of a couple of shareware C compilers for MS-DOS, but I don't know much about them. One is or was available in the file PCC12C.ZIP and might have been written by somebody named Mark De Smet. Another, ``Pacific C'', is or was available at ftp.hitech.com.au/hitech/pacific.
A research group at Princeton generated a ``Retargetable C Compiler'' and made the results freely available. Supposedly they have a compiler called lcc, although I've never tried it. You can find details on their web page, http://www.cs.princeton.edu/software/lcc .
Finally, we come to the GNU C compiler, or gcc. This is an extremely high-quality compiler put out by the folks at the Free Software Foundation. It was originally developed as a Unix compiler, and there are plenty of professional programmers doing serious, commercial development using it. There are also ports to other operating systems, including VMS and--though it seems impossible--MS-DOS. gcc is a huge and powerful compiler and MS-DOS is a cramped, restricted quasi operating system, but somehow D J Delorie got gcc working under it, by dint of a lot of hard work and a 32-bit DOS extender or two. The result is called ``djgpp,'' and it's described on its own web page at http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/. (The main, non-djgpp distribution of gcc is on the FSF's ftp server at prep.ai.mit.edu; see also the FSF home page at http://www.fsf.org/.)
The downside of gcc (and, by extension, djgpp) is that it is huge, complex, and difficult to install. It is explicitly ``not recommended for use in learning C.'' I have had students use it successfully, but downloading and installing it (it's between 5 and 10 meg to download) is a daunting task.
I've heard that there's another, more recent port of gcc that's tailored for use with Windows, but I don't know any details yet.
Alas, there are currently no shareware or freeware compilers that I know of for the Macintosh. (There were two, Sesame C and Harvest C, but the former never worked and the latter only barely worked and has been abandoned by its author. I've heard that there is a version of gcc which works on the Macintosh, but it requires the Macintosh Programmer's Workbench which, though it's available free from Apple, is nearly impossible to use.)
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