Well hot damn!

You know that shell interface to C++ I was talking about? Turns out it already exists! It's a tool called SWIG, used for wrapping up one type of code to be used by another language. And it turns out to be exactly what I'm looking for--a (relatively) simple way to access class member functions directly, in an ad-hoc way.

I don't have the servos with me right now, so I can't test it out fully, but after sweating over a hot command line for the better part of an hour, I've got it to the point of compiling and throwing the expected exception when it can't find the serial port. I am super excited about this, and I'm definitely going to be learning more Python from here on out. And maybe I'll finally get back into Lisp, if I can find a single goddamn interpreter...

EDIT: It works like a charm. :D