Cycle a list from alternating sides

Question

Given a list

a = [0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]

how can I get

b = [0,9,1,8,2,7,3,6,4,5]

That is, produce a new lis

Answer 1

Use the right toolz.

from toolz import interleave, take

b = list(take(len(a), interleave((a, reversed(a)))))

First, I tried something similar to Raymond Hettinger's solution with itertools (Python 3).

from itertools import chain, islice

interleaved = chain.from_iterable(zip(a, reversed(a)))
b = list(islice(interleaved, len(a)))