Reversing a list without (append)

Question

I would like to reverse a list using cdr, car and cons. Since lists in lisp are asymmetrical (can only insert at the beginning), I am interested on how one would write a procedure to do that without using (append). Please review my code.

(define (reverse l)
 (define (aux orig result)
 (if (null? orig) result
 (aux (cdr orig) (cons (car orig) result))))
 (aux l '()))

Is this good enough? Are there better or more efficient ways to do this?

Answer 1

Given that you don't want to use append, this looks great to me. I'm not sure if I can even think of a different way to do it.

My only suggestion would be naming related. l is a terrible name for a variable - it's too close to 1. orig is questionable, since it's not really the original list, it's the list you're currently "popping" (logically, not literally) off of - so you could simply rename both l and orig to something like lst or xs or elems or ....