I think you both missed the point of my post.
First of all @Ralph only:
This mindset is all fine when you're a not-professional amateur programmer as you say you are, but you did fail to see the importance of me adding those things you condemn. It is true that they may have little effect in such a small code, but on larger code you will notice it.
Let's start with why I put it in a function... Most short programs, like this one, are pretty useless in themselves, and commonly are meant to be employed in some bigger structure. So, I already incorporated the fact that some user may want to use my code in their huge program, and in that case, code like lrcvs's is not practical. Hence: I put it in a function, and a separate sourcefile, to be turned into some module or compiled into a library that this user's huge program uses.
Now on to the point of adding dims and such for anything you use... it improves readability. If you have a large code where on every line a new variable may be created, you will have a hard time keeping track of which variables were already declared and which were not. So yeah, it helps with reading code. There are many more factors that determine the readability of your code though, like indentation (which lrcvs's code also lacks) and many more.
And yes, I am currently a professional programmer (although parttime during school), though not in qbasic but C++ (which really shows in my code, lol).
Anyway, on to the next topic.
@lrcvs & @Ralph:
As I said at the complete start of this post, you missed the point of me posting a different snippet. I just noticed that lrcvs's code could be made a lot faster by a few simple alterations. This by no means means that my code is hyper-optimized, on the contrary even. But you will see the difference with a small benchmark:
The benchmark executes 1 million evaluations of a non-palindrome words and palindrome words of 23 letters, both in interpreter form and compiled exe form.
Quote:Result on non-palindromes:
Mine: 2.53 sec / exe: 0.61 sec
Yours: 2.96 sec / exe: 1.70 sec
Yours(optimized): 2.97 sec / exe: 1.65 sec
Most of this is probably function overhead, since the actual evaluation loop is very short.
Quote:Result on 23-letter palindrome:
Mine: 5.65 sec / exe: 0.82 sec
Yours: 21.70 sec / exe: 12.96 sec
Yours(optimized): 10.93 sec / exe: 6.59 sec
Yours(optimized) is lrcvs's code, but only looping till half of the string and not the whole thing.
You should be able to see the difference now. I can by no means guarantee how much of this benchmark is correct, since I do not know the caching behaviour of windows, nor do I know how BC.EXE compiles all this code.
But yeah, I suggest you (lrcvs) at the very least make your code loop only half of the string instead of the whole thing, you win a lot of time with that, according to the test results.