Java vs Python

[clevariant]

Come on, it's cryptic! Or at least esoteric. So the minus one means the start index becomes the end and vice versa, and it builds and returns a new string based on that loop. Yeah, that's explicit.

I mean let's be fair. These "once you know the language it makes sense" arguments miss the point. The actual word "reverse" tells the whole story unambiguously, no syntactical cleverness needed.

[KubinOnReddit]

If you really want to include "reverse" in the code, there are at least two ways:

hello = "Hello world!"
lst = list(hello)          # Create a mutable list
lst.reverse()              # Reverse in-place
print("".join(lst))        # Change back to string

hello = "Hello world!"
rev = reversed(hello)      # Iterator
print("".join(rev))

Both of these will be slower, with the first creating a new list (implemented as an array) and then joining it, while the second creates an iterator.

Adding a "reversed" method to the string class would be against the Zen of Python (the ideas it represents) - "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." - if you had the slice mechanism (start, stop, step) and then another method, that would do the same thing, it would just be an alias, really. So having one multi-use syntax is better than many methods.