I highly recommend Norvig's (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)) as a very short, practical introduction to implementing a language. http://norvig.c

I highly recommend Norvig's (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)) as a very short, practical introduction to implementing a language. http://norvig.com/lispy.html http://norvig.com/lispy.html There's also a followup article implementing additional data types and tail call optimization. http://norvig.com/lispy2.html http://norvig.com/lispy2.html