Speeding up parentheses (and lots more) in R

As I noted here, enclosing sub-expressions in parentheses is slower in R than enclosing them in curly brackets. I now know why, and I’ve modified R to reduce (but not eliminate) the slowness of parentheses. The modification speeds up many other operations in R as well, for an average speedup of something like 5% for programs that aren’t dominated by large built-in operations like matrix multiplies.