I know that this question was answered a while ago and i appologize for the intrusion. However,I was working on a way of doing this in python as well and i just thought that i would share the way that i did it in is as follows,
word = 'aibohphobia'
word_rev = reversed(word)
def is_palindrome(word):
if list(word) == list(word_rev):
print'True, it is a palindrome'
else:
print'False, this is''t a plindrome'
is_palindrome(word)