Scheme might be a good alternative to Forth.
One of the nicest features of Scheme (and other LISPs) is the lack of syntax — everything is an S-expression. So parsing is trivial and you can concentrate on other aspects of the language.
A LISPer friend once joked to me that he’d picked up a compiler book thinking he might learn some tricks, but it turned out the whole book was about tokenizing and parsing, which he considered a solved problem. And, of course, there’s Alan Kay’s comment about how one half page of the *Lisp 1.5 Manual* by McCarthy amounted to “the Maxwell’s Equations of programming”.
Google “scheme in one defun” for a simple C implementation. Peter Norvig has a one-page implementation in Python.