C is a general purpose, powerful, and structured programming language that is both high-level and low-level. It was designed for developing fast, reliable, efficient, economical, and portable system software. C has built-in functions, more operators than other languages, and is simple to learn. An algorithm is a sequence of instructions to obtain a desired result in a specified order, such as a program to calculate the sum of two numbers. A compiler converts all source code into machine code to create an executable file, while an interpreter converts and executes code line-by-line. The C character set includes letters, digits, special characters, and whitespace that make up commands, expressions, and other language tokens.