Brace matching
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Brace matching, or parentheses matching, is a syntax highlighting feature of certain text editors and integrated development environments that highlights matching sets of braces in languages such as Java and C++ 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 the class definition has been reached. Brace matching is particularly useful when many nested if statements, program loops, etc. are involved.
[edit] Implementations
Vim's % command does brace matching,[1] and NetBeans has brace matching built-in.[2] 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 into comments. In VSC 7.0, its behavior was changed to compute commented braces.[3] IntelliJ IDEA's Ruby on Rails plugin also enables braces matching.[4] It has been proposed that Perl 5 be modified to facilitate braces matching.[5] 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.
[edit] Example
for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
- System.out.println(i);
}
