range operator

[Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS @ Pike developers forum]

I second that. I suspect the reason why there is no such thing is that
the low level search implementation is pretty complex with all its
optimizations, so doing the same thing for backward searching would
result either in rather extensive code duplication or some quite ugly
macro trickery (on top of all the other macro madness already in
there). At least that's what stopped me when I've considered fixing
it.