DeSmet C
Recently I purchased a bundle of retro computer books I found on Facebook Marketplace,. The reason was mainly for some C64 books that where in the bundle, but in the bundle there was also ‘The C Compendium’ by David Lawrence and Mark England.
Looking at the introductory pages it mentions that the listings in the book were compiled on the Digital Research C compiler, but they also gave a note of thanks to a company called MLH Technology of Comberback, Cheshire who helped to provide them with a copy of (in their words) ‘the excellent DeSmet compiler’.
This piqued my interest for two reasons, the first being that Cheshire is a county next to the one I live in, and also I’d never heard of the DeSmet C compiler. So I thought as I had the book it might be worth having a look to see if I could find anything out about this compiler and see if I could see it in action.
History and background
Mark DeSmet developed the DeSmet C compiler, a popular and compact C compiler for MS-DOS and Macintosh computers in the 1980s.
History and development
Company: The DeSmet C compiler was originally produced by C-Ware Corporation, founded by Mark DeSmet.
C Ware Corporation 970 W. El Camino Real Suite 4 Sunnyvale, CA 94097
As you can see from an advert from BYTE magazine they sold the compiler in a number of different packages which meant people were able to buy the functionality they needed at different price points.
As you can also see from the advert they also had a compiler for the Mac.
The earlier editions of DeSmet C were more compatible with Kernighan and Ritchie’s (K&R ) original dialect of C, but compatibility with ANSI C was improved in the later versions that were published.
As the book citation states that the edition was published in 1985, I’ll use the version that corresponds to what was available in that year, this correlates to version 2.51.
- DeSmet C 2.3 (April 1984)
- DeSmet C 2.40 (October 1984)
- DeSmet C 2.5 (October 1985)
- Desmet C 3 (April 1987)
- DeSmet C {DC88} 3.03 (February 1988)
- DeSmet C 3.1(May 1988)
- Personal C Compiler 1.2c
Personal C Compiler 1.2d
My internet searching also found the final article in a ‘Teach yourself C’ series appearing in Personal Computer World May 1985 edition.
Which mentioned MLH Technology and the DeSmet C compiler as part of an offer to support the series.
After a bit of internet searching I found a old site dedicated to this compiler by someone who had worked with it and had campaigned to make it available and eventually managed to be able to get the compiler placed under the GNU GPL.
The site contained the source code, PDFs of the manuals and versions of the compiler so I was able to obtain a couple of different versions fairly quickly.
So, whenever source code from this book wants the DeSmet compiler, you can also use PCC instead. For example, to compile and link a D2F program:
PCC d2f
PCCL d2f
This compares to using for the DeSmet 2.51 compiler:
C88 d2f
BIND d2f