Re: Seriously?
I have to admit I've never taken apart compiler code (although I might be doing soon, given that I'm not primarily a coder this fills me with a little fear), but whilst still at college I both wrote a bytecode interpreter in assembly, and tried to write another interpreter in BASIC (it was horribly slow, I gave up. At that point I didn't have access to a C compiler).
At the time I had more interest in using tools to create something, rather than creating the tools themselves.