The order of items in a list are preserved until the list is modified by inserting an item to or removing an item from the list. However, preserving the order does not guarantee the items to be sorted.

The sort() method reorders the items in a list based on an increasing/ascending alphanumeric ordering. The sort can be reversed by setting the reverse = True argument in the sort function as sort(reverse = True). The values in the list need to be comparable:

temp = [1, 2.3, 3, 2.4, 6, 3, 7]

temp.sort()
print(temp)

temp.sort(reverse=True)
print(temp)

Output:

[1, 2.3, 2.4, 3, 3, 6, 7]
[7, 6, 3, 3, 2.4, 2.3, 1]

The reverse() method on the other hand, simply reverses the order of elements in the list:

temp = [1, 2.3, 3, 2.4, 6, 3, 7]

temp.reverse()
print(temp)

Output: [7, 3, 6, 2.4, 3, 2.3, 1]

sort() method can be applied to the list of strings as well:

colors = ["black", "azure", "ruby", "orange", "blue", "violet", "pink" ]

colors.sort()
print(colors)

Output: ['azure', 'black', 'blue', 'orange', 'pink', 'ruby', 'violet']

The modification operations cannot be performed on a tuple, however, there is a workaround for such cases,

• Generate a new list using the list() constructor having the tuple as its argument,
• Apply modification, sort, reverse, insert, remove etc on the new list,
• Convert the new list to tuple using the tuple() constructor, and assign to the initial tuple if necessary
• Be careful that other entities such as variables referring to or lists, tuples, dictionaries containing the older version of the tuple may still have reference to that older version