Dear Thomas,

thank you for your reply. I did not realize you actually married python 
and ocaml so closely.

My inquiry was actually geared towards getting some sort of 
Mathematica-like front-end environment that could link to a 
computational "core" (or cores) running as separate processes. Are there 
any pooor man's frontends out there? I am aware of Texmacs and Sage. 
Texmacs strikes me a bit idiosyncratic, while Sage scares me in sheer 
size. I just want a nice little general-purpose frontend that can do an 
interactive loop and show pictures and math formulas as results.

Andrej