Reversing single linked list in C#

Question

I am trying to reverse a linked list. This is the code I have come up with:

 public static void Reverse(ref Node root)
 {
      Node tmp = root;
      Node n         


        

Answer 1

That question gets asked a lot. When I was asked it in my interviews many years ago, I reasoned as follows: a singly-linked list is essentially a stack. Reversing a linked list is therefore a trivial operation on stacks:

newList = emptyList;
while(!oldList.IsEmpty())
    newList.Push(oldList.Pop());

Now all you have to do is implement IsEmpty and Push and Pop, which are one or two lines tops.

I wrote that out in about twenty seconds and the interviewer seemed somewhat perplexed at that point. I think he was expecting me to take about twenty minutes to do about twenty seconds work, which has always seemed odd to me.