How to reorder a large number of columns?

I'm looking for a pipeable one-liner to reorder a large number of columns (where manually entering the column numbers in e.g. an awk command such as awk '{print $3,$2,$1}' is not feasible). The order could be given by a sorting scheme (alphabetical, numerical - so like 'sort' but acting on columns rather than rows.) or be arbitrarily given in a text file.