Started learning C++ a few days ago, and this is my first full program. It takes in words until an end-of-file character prompt is given, and then outputs which of those words are palindromes and the longest palindrome of those words.

I want to know if my evaluation for whether each string is a palindrome is acceptable given the little knowledge I have about C++ thus far, and by acceptable I mean like not costly or just not agreeable for good C++ code. I was unsure if it would be better to access characters by position in each string with like a "double iterator" to check if they were the same while the iterators converged, or if just making a reversed string and checking is a better approach like I did.

Also just if my general program structure looks okay - I'm rather unsure if my desire to have void functions to clean up my main function is really a good thing to do or otherwise.

Any other critiques would be greatly appreciated :)

#include <iostream>
#include <list>
#include <iomanip>

using std::cin;         using std::cout;        using std::string;
using std::istream;     using std::list;        using std::endl;
using std::setw;

istream& read(istream& is, list<string>& word_list)
{
    word_list.clear();
    string word;
    while(is >> word)
        word_list.push_back(word);
    
    is.clear();
    return is;
}

void evaluate(list<string>& words, string& longest)
{
    longest.clear();
    typedef string::size_type str_sz;
    
    list<string>::iterator it = words.begin();
    while (it != words.end())
    {
        if (*it == string(it->rbegin(), it->rend()))
        {
            longest = max(longest, *it);
            ++it;
        }
        else
        {
            it = words.erase(it);
        }
    }
}

void output(const list<string>& palindrs, const string& longest)
{
    if (palindrs.empty())
        cout << "No palindromes were given :(" << endl;
    else{
        cout << "The palindrome(s) given are: " << '\n' << endl;
        for (list<string>::const_iterator it = palindrs.begin(); 
            it != palindrs.end(); ++it)
            cout << setw(5) << "- \"" << *it << "\"" << endl;
        
        cout << '\n' << "And the longest palindrome is \"" <<
             longest << "\"!";
    }
}

int main()
{
    list<string> words;

    cout << "Please enter some words." << endl;
    read(cin, words);
    
    string longest;
    evaluate(words, longest);
    
    output(words, longest);

    return 0;
}