Checking for a palindrome
I wanted to offer a different angle of better. This code could be more generic. Why is it tied to exactly std::string - what if I need to check palindromic nature of std::wstring or the contents of a std::vector&lt;T&gt;? How about std::list&lt;T&gt; or std::map&lt;T&gt; (if palindromic can even mean anything on a std::map)? Here's how you can handle all of those with a single function:

template &lt;typename Sequence&gt;
bool is_palindromic(const Sequence&amp; seq)
{
    auto count = seq.size() / 2; // rounded down is fine, as a middle element matches itself
    auto i = seq.begin();        // prefer std::begin(seq) in C++14
    auto j = seq.rbegin();       // prefer std::rbegin(seq) in C++14

    for (Sequence::size_type c = 0; c &lt; count; ++c, ++i, ++j)
    {
        if (*i != *j)
            return false;
    }
    return true; // considers sequences without mismatched characters to be palindromes
}


Note that I incorporated the other comments I agree with - in particular passing by const reference, and using the sequence's size_type. I'm not sure how to best support arrays, however; while std::[r]begin will handle arrays, I don't believe arrays have a .size() or ::size_type to use. I guess that means they need their own overload, or at least some overloaded helpers.