# Why does the FrontEnd lose matching of parentheses when we insert quotations?

Bug introduced in V10.0 and resolved in V11.3

(These are guesses. It is likely to have been resolved in an earlier version V11.X, but V11.3 is what I have access to.)

I am running Mathematica 10.0.1 on a four-year old iMac running OS 10.6.8. The following irritating behavior occurs regularly: I have a list with parentheses, and later on I need to add something to an earlier part of the list that involves quotation marks. As soon as I include the quotation marks, the matching between the parentheses gets lost, and I need to go in by hand to fix the parentheses matching. See the gif below for an example.

This also happens in version 10.0.2.0 on a 2014 MacBook Air running OS 10.10.4. I have verified that this does not happen in Mathematica 8 on the four-year old iMac.

Is this problem reproducible in general? How do we fix it? Is it already fixed in a later version? If so, is there a work-around without upgrading? Should this be reported as a bug to WRI?

• Same for me: MMA v10.2, OSX 10.9.5 Jul 31 '15 at 21:20
• Yes, I see the same behavior in 10.2 on Win7-64. Interestingly, the behavior seems triggered by two-dimensional formatting of the power on my system: if I write (a+1)^2 instead of using the superscript form, the parenthesis matching seems unaffected by quotes. Is that true on on your system as well? Jul 31 '15 at 21:30
• @MarcoB. Yes, that's true on mine. I've also run into situations where the matching between a Slot and the corresponding & will get lost, but I wasn't able to reproduce that; I can't quite remember when that happens. Jul 31 '15 at 21:41
• I remember another question about a similar problem, but not well enough to find it. Can anyone else do better? Jul 31 '15 at 23:42
• @Mr.Wizard. This one, I think. It's essentially the same problem. Mark as duplicate? That one is still unanswered. Aug 1 '15 at 4:20