John Ousterhout designed the Tcl language to be an embedded scripting language for use in other (e.g. Perl) applications. To embed Tcl in some other application apparently involves the use of a C compiler. It may even involve recompiling Perl itself.

However, I have worked in a place where a group of young geniuses attempted to create their own scripting language, and anything would be better than that. I would get Ousterhout's book Tcl and the Tk Toolkit and go at it. About a third of the book is devoted to embedding Tcl in something else.

An additional benefit of the book, which is a classic, is that since we Perler's use Tk in Perl/Tk and Ousterhout wrote Tk we are learning from the master, so to speak.