today’s kata

In Ruby, one easy way to check for palindromes would be to write a method such as this:

class String
 def palindrome?
   self == self.reverse
 end
end

But the C++ part of my brain screams that this is likely to be very inefficient. So, today’s kata: test-drive a palindrome? method for String, ensuring (with tests) that it is much faster than the above.