FYI, released a Python wrapper for LAMMPS today.
See the 2 Nov 10 patch and this new section of the doc
pages: http://lammps.sandia.gov/doc/Section_python.html.
This allows LAMMPS to be driven by a Python script or
interactively, as well as hooking it to another code or to
a GUI, or to do real-time plots or viz.
The latter can already be done via fix imd and VMD - the
Python wrapper is a different mechanism of controlling LAMMPS
thru a scripting language and glueing it to other software.
Steve