Brace matching, or parentheses matching, is a syntax highlighting

Syntax highlighting

Syntax highlighting is a feature of some text editors that display text—especially source code—in different colors and fonts according to the category of terms. This feature eases writing in a structured language such as a programming language or a markup language as both structures and...

 feature of certain text editor

Text editor

A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files.Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code....

s and integrated development environment

Integrated development environment

An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...

s that highlights matching sets of braces in languages such as Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

 and C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

 that use them. The purpose is to help the programmer navigate through the code and also spot any improper matching, which would cause the program to not compile or malfunction. If a closing brace is left out, for instance, the compiler will not know that the end of a block of code has been reached. Brace matching is particularly useful when many nested if statements, program loops, etc. are involved.

Implementations

Vim

Vim (text editor)

Vim is a text editor written by Bram Moolenaar and first released publicly in 1991. Based on the vi editor common to Unix-like systems, Vim is designed for use both from a command line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface...

's % command does brace matching, and NetBeans

NetBeans

NetBeans refers to both a platform framework for Java desktop applications, and an integrated development environment for developing with Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Groovy, C, C++, Scala, Clojure, and others...

 has brace matching built-in.
Brace matching can also be a tool for code navigation. In Visual Studio C++ 6.0, brace matching behavior was set to ignore braces found in comments. In VSC 7.0, its behavior was changed to compute commented braces.
IntelliJ IDEA's Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails, often shortened to Rails or RoR, is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language.-History:...

 plugin also enables braces matching. It has been proposed that Perl

Perl

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

 5 be modified to facilitate braces matching. The Microsoft Excel 2003 formula bar has parentheses matching. Its implementation shows all the pairs of parentheses as different colors, so it is possible to easily analyze them all at once.

Example

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)

{

System.out.println(i);

}|