Spent a little time hacking on forward interop between Sencha and the Framework, that is enabling Scheme programs to call into existing libraries. For now, I settled on a new callp function (stands for “call platform”) which does some heavyweight reflection-based lookup and invocation. It takes a varying number of arguments, and if the best match is non-static, the first argument is used as the target of the invocation. The assemblies to search are defined at the command line, similar to C#'s /reference:x switch.

As an example of a few simple calls:

(callp "Console.WriteLine" "Hello, World!") -> #t
(callp "Math.Max" 32.5 59.2) -> 59.2
(let ((stream
      (callp "System.IO.StreamReader.ctor" (callp "System.IO.File.OpenRead" "somefile.txt"))))
      (write (callp "System.IO.StreamReader.ReadToEnd" stream))
      (callp "System.IO.StreamReader.Close" stream)) -> #t

A bit verbose, yes, but I'm trying to avoid extending the language and instead extending the standard library. The “-> x” part is what the result of the expression evaluates to. Any methods with void returns translate into true, and a failure to locate a method translates into false. Admittedly, not optimal (for example with legitimate boolean return types where false is semantically meaningful), but it's at least got me cooking with gas for now.