>Personally, I think the best way to start working on higher level language
util
>ities (C or otherwise) is to build upon what has already been accomplished.

I certainly must agree with this. You might also want to consider gcc. It
is built so that by teaching it how to generate code for the 'basic'
operations, it can generate code (even optmized code!). It's a good
chunk of work just to get it running, but then you can get the code added
to the gcc compiler, and leverage a lot of front end work without having
to do it yourself. A classmate of mine added limited 8051 support when we
were in college. Not a trivial task, but once it's in place, you can do a
lot of stuff.

Unless of course you want to write a parser and that stuff for practice :-)

- Mike