Why is that? In this case why not opt for Lua which is basically made to embed in C?
Would be great if someone made an easily embeddable scripting language that doesn't feel hacked together.
It certainly wasn't casually hacked together, though. Ierusalimschy et. al. have thoroughly documented the language and its development rationale with admirable clarity.
In particular, the paper "C APIs in extension and extensible languages"[2] will be of special interest to prospective embeddable language developers. "Passing a Language through the Eye of a Needle: How the embeddability of Lua impacted its design" is also a good read, for those who can summon bits through the ACM hellm... er, portal.