The reason for LISP or SCHEME as the tutorial is that parsing is easy and doesn't call for Flex/Bison. There is a level of semantics also that if you don't stra

The reason for LISP or SCHEME as the tutorial is that parsing is easy and doesn't call for Flex/Bison. There is a level of semantics also that if you don't strain yourself on edge cases you can do a decent interpreter or compiler pretty quickly. Without making this post long I could "tempt" or encourage you by suggesting that if you take the outermost paren pair off an s-expression, you sortof have a language of function application: defun fact n = if (< n 2) 1 (* n (fact (- n 1))) I think there is an SRFI for Scheme that proposes something like that plus offside rule to get rid of parens. You could get rid of more parens by adding operator precedence to the syntax (and that offside rule would help too), but now you're making the parsing interesting instead of making the execution interesting.