Is there a way to invoke scheme such that it evaluates expressions read from a file?
Almost all implementations provide such a mechanism. Please consult your documentation. Also see SRFI-22, “Running Scheme Scripts on Unix”, for possible way to turn your Scheme file into an executable script. On a *nix system, the convention is for programs to read from standard-input, and Scheme interpreters will typically do so. So, you would expect this to work: somescheme < somefile.scm Many interpreters provide command-options to load-and-execute a file. Guile, for example, uses -s somefile.scm.