I would not particularly want to write a compiler in Tcl, Perl, or Ruby; on the other hand, if I were free to choose, I would pick Lisp, ML, or Haskell over C f

I would not particularly want to write a compiler in Tcl, Perl, or Ruby; on the other hand, if I were free to choose, I would pick Lisp, ML, or Haskell over C for compiler writing any day. For what it is worth, I have written a compiler in C and I have written one in Lisp, and doing it in Lisp was far more pleasant.