Thread: Efficiency drain

So I'm making changes to my Expression Manipulator program to allow more operators than the basic 4 and exponentiation. It basically uses a function that does a search and replace. ie:
3+4^5
becomes
add(3,expt(4,5))

The problem is that when deleting things in parentheses, after 5 of them, the program becomes horribly slow:
(((x/y)/z)/a)/b -- around 2 seconds. another layer of parentheses makes it 6 seconds

Is string manipulation really that time consuming? Or is it probably another piece of my program?

hehe... found out the reason...

my test expression looks like this:
( ( ( 3 / 4 ) / 5 ) / 6 ) / 7

Everything in parentheses is ignored, then parsed recursively. Everything seperated by a '/' sign is a Term.

So I created a static int for the class Term and incremented it everytime a constructor was created. End result:
54149

With an extra layer of parentheses it became 415929. Add another layer:
(((((3/4)/5)/6)/7)/8)/9

2866334.

Obviously 2.8 million Term objects where 20 would suffice is a problem...

Do you want to work for Microsofts XP team?

There's some overlap... for instance there are four terms in ((x / y) / z): x, y, (x / y), and z

But you're right, I have way too many objects... and I gotta search through code to find out why.