There is no point in doing such things in C, since C is just too low level.

What is normally done is a very simple and stupid, but extensible language bootstrapped with C (or whatever else), and then grown up to a level when it's convenient to implement a functional language compiler (i.e., at least higher order functions and some pattern matching).

I wrote about such a bootstrap some time ago: https://combinatorylogic.wordpress.com/2015/01/14/bootstrapp...