Unable to install MLton

[Antonio Eduardo Costa Pereira]

Dear Sir.
I think that I should start this letter by stating 
that I am not very good with computers. Thus, be patient
with my questions. My profession requires  that I write 
computer programs from time to time.  Thus, I  use SML 
and Clean, because  these two languages are easy to learn 
(at least for a person who is a linguist by profession). 
By the way, the operational system that I am using is 
Slackware 7.2. Why? Well,  Slackware was the only operational
system that I succeed in installing, after failing with 
Windows 98 (the plug and play did  not recognize my network),
Red Hat (I was not able  to install  openwindow, that I 
need to run Clean), and a few more. At least, I was able 
to install Slackware. Then, I downloaded MLTon,binaries.
I typed the following line from the root: 

rmp -i  mlton-20000712-2.i386.rpm

Here is what I got:

python >= 1.5.1 is needed by mlton-20000712-2
ld-linux.so.2 is needed by mlton-20000712-2
libc.so.6 is needed by mlton-20000712-2
libm.so.6 is needed by mlton-20000712-2
/bin/sh is needed by mlton-20000712-2
/usr/bin/env is needed by mlton-20000712-2
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.1) is needed by mlton-20000712-2
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.1) is needed by mlton-20000712-2
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.0) is needed by mlton-20000712-2 

I do not know what python is, but I typed "python" ]
just the same. I got: 

Python 1.5.2 (#1, Jul 17 1999, 22:10:16)
Copyright 1991-1995 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam

This means that I do have Python, right? I went on:

locate libm.so.6
locate:
/lib/libm.so.6 

To make a long story short, it seems that I have 
everything that MLTon claims that I do not have. 
Any suggestions?

Eduardo Costa