I could see a case for it if you were finding line endings in bytes mode, and then casting a buffer to a UTF-8 string. Then you'd benefit from a reverse iterato

I could see a case for it if you were finding line endings in bytes mode, and then casting a buffer to a UTF-8 string. Then you'd benefit from a reverse iterator, which UTF-8 supports just fine. I imagine the main reason people would use indexing is to scan through strings in lockstep, e.g. to implement comparison, but iterators can cover that case as well, especially if you can copy them.