Lisp, or any prefix or postfix language, is relatively easy to parse and execute (in the case of an interpreter) or translate (in the case of a compiler/transla

Lisp, or any prefix or postfix language, is relatively easy to parse and execute (in the case of an interpreter) or translate (in the case of a compiler/translator) because its syntactic structure mirrors the abstract syntax tree (AST) that the semantic analysis phase (i.e. the last of the 3 phases identified in the post) will traverse as it either executes (interpreter) or translates (compiler). In other words, the parse tree is nearly identical to the AST. That isn't true of Algol-like languages, and so the syntactic analysis and semantic analysis phases of a compiler/translator of Algol-like languages is more complex. That's why Lisp, or really any prefix or postfix language, is a good first language to implement, as opposed to something like C.