Thinking (again) about an Objective-C bridge

One of the issues to solve in doing an Objective-C bridge for Dylan is how
to represent a method invocation on the Dylan side.

In C, we have %call-c-function, which looks like:

    %call-c-function (?name:expression, #key ?c-modifiers:expression = "")
        (?parameters:*) => (?results:*)
      (?arguments:*)
    end;

In LispWorks, they use this sort of syntax:

    (invoke window "close")
    (invoke box "setWidth:height:" 10 20)

In ClozureCL, this is the syntax:

    (send w :set-alpha-value 0.5)
    (send v :mouse p :in-rect r)

In Python:

    anObject.modifyArg_andAnother_(arg1, arg2)

Overall, I like the approach used by ClozureCL as it seems much more
natural and more like the Objective-C that one would see. They've also got
variants of sending to the superclass, sending when a structure is
returned, etc.  Having the keywords and the arguments alternate makes it
nicely readable (much more so than the LispWorks example).

In ClozureCL, a lot of the work is done by macros, but I don't think our
macros in Dylan are powerful enough to do the same work. So what can we get
away with? We don't want a lot of work being done at run-time as we'd like
for this to be as efficient as possible.

My thinking is that we might need a custom converter, much like
%call-c-function has, with the corresponding compiler support.  I'd love to
be proved wrong though, so what thoughts do any of you have on this?

 - Bruce

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