Well, they could write a list in python, but that's more a single night's homework than an entire class (with the appropriate foreknowledge) to my understanding, so what's an interesting middle ground? A logical language (e.g. Prolog) would be interesting, but I have no idea the complexities involved. I imagine implementing in python would reduce the complexities of the actual programming step allowing more time for what I think are the interesting parts of a compiler course.