Making New Types In C

[cman]

I'm designing a little preprocessor for source code files based on a language of my own design.The compiler for the language will be written in C  and generates instructions for a "virtual machine" that will execute the instuctions and generate a new source code file for input to whatever compiler/assembler one might be using. Anyway, the language should implement a generic reference type that can point to any data object that can be declared in the program , so I'll implement the generic pointer type as an "int" in C and cast the address of any variable pointed to as the "int" type. To dereference a generic pointer type I wrote the following type of function ( one for each different type that one can dereference to ) :

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char dereferenceChar ( int address , int dereferenceLevel )
{

char ch;   

_asm{
       
      push eax //save eax
  push ecx //save ecx
 
  mov ecx , dereferenceLevel //use ecx to count
  mov eax , address //move address to dereference to eax
  start:
  cmp ecx , 0 //check if the count is 0
  je done     // no more dereferencing to do
  mov eax , dword ptr [ eax ] //dereference eax and place in eax
  dec ecx //decrement the count
  jmp start //jump to start of loop
  done:
  mov ch , al //store the character in ch
  pop ecx //restore registers
      pop eax
}
return ch;
}



Is this a good way to achieve the desired outcome ( my assembler is a little rusty but I'm currently reading "Write Great Code" by Randall Hyde so it should improve  :bg ) ? Anyone have a different solution?