>>Here's one that shows iteration for various length strings in 100-element increments, and in 10-element increments up to 50. ALINES() becomes considerably faster the larger the element list. The crossover seems to happen around 40 elements.
>Right, that matches my experience. ALINES() is linear. GETWORDxxx() is not.

Here's another version which uses MEMLINES() with these changes.

* 100 elements
* 0.451 ALINES()
* 1.093 MEMLINES()

* 200 elements
* 1.128 ALINES()
* 4.097 MEMLINES()

* 300 elements
* 2.301 ALINES()
* 8.763 MEMLINES()

* 400 elements
* 3.670 ALINES()
* 15.230 MEMLINES()

* 500 elements
* 5.744 ALINES()
* 24.424 MEMLINES()


* Code
    CREATE CURSOR c_memlines (cText m)
    INSERT INTO c_memlines (cText) VALUES (CHRTRAN(lcForward, ",", CHR(13)))

FUNCTION reverse_memlines
LOCAL lnLines, lcText, lnI
LOCAL ARRAY laLines[1]
    IF CHR(13) $ c_memlines.cText
        lnLines = MEMLINES(c_memlines.cText)
        lcText  = ALLTRIM(MLINE(c_memlines.cText, lnLines))
        FOR lnI = lnLines - 1 TO 1 STEP -1
            lcText = lcText + ", " + ALLTRIM(MLINE(c_memlines.cText, lnI))
        NEXT
        RETURN lcText
    ENDIF
    RETURN c_memlines.cText