YE, Where Do You Draw the Line?

python used to run cleanly on solarics right out of the box. It's a quick and cheap tool to show kids cometers can do fancy stuff like minke noise. I've been trying to figure out what i've mentally been calling the minimum violable python. What is the core set of python constructs that must exist to reconstitute all the other parts of python in its syntax? And kind of, if we were to start from scratch, almost, why would that look like?