Reversing a copy of a list

Once in a while, we need to reverse the order of the items in a list collection. Some algorithms, for example, produce results in a reversed order. We'll look at the way numbers converted to a specific base are often generated from least-significant to most-significant digit. We generally want to display the values with the most-significant digit first. This leads to a need to reverse the sequence of digits in a list.

We have two ways to reverse a list. First, there's the reverse() method. Then there's this handy trick.

Getting ready

Let's say we're doing a conversion among number bases. We'll look at how a number is represented in a base, and how we can compute that representation from a number.

Any value, v, can be defined as a polynomial function of the various digits, d_n, in a given base, b:

v = d_n × bⁿ + d_n-1 × b^n-1 + d_n-2 × b^n-2 + ... + d₁ × b + d₀

A rational number has a finite number of digits. An irrational number would have an infinite series of digits.

For...