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by mortoray 1826 days ago
It's not about reversing, but about checking whether reverse iteration works. This is required to perform proper truncation (for limited length fields) as well as visual editing for a cursor to go through the text.

It can additionally be an indication as to whether regular expression matching works, though that is usually handled by a library, and not the core string types.

My contention was always that if a "string" does not reverse text, then it's no better than an "array<char>". The existence of a "string" type implies it should do more.