Mixing numerics and maxima in LISP



Hello,
	I've been going the round-about way for my mechanics problems, doing 
symbolics in Maxima, generating code for solving the thus obtained ODE 
by C through Lisp/Python, then doing visualisation in LISP with cl-opengl.
	I'm not all that experienced with Lisp (or Maxima for that matter!) 
yet, but I sense that I can generate code on the fly using macros. I 
know maxima has a lisp mode; but from what I've seen, it
does not strike me as a particularly clean interface; by "clean", I mean 
something like Sussman and Wisdom's scmutils.
	I can probably do something like replace maxima's function tags in the 
expression list with the usual operators and put it inside a function 
definition; but is there a better interface for Lisp ? Is there a better 
way of going about this ? Has someone done something like this before 
with Maxima - so that I can steal their code :) ?

Cheers,
Akshay