Most programming languages (such as C#, Java, …) allow you to sort lists. Most of them also allow you to specify a sorting function so that you can customize the sort order. These functions usually take parameters a and b and define the return value as follows:

Usually you would do something like this (code in C#):

int Compare(int a, int b) {
  if (a < b) {
    return -1;
  }
  else if (a > b) {
    return 1;
  }
  else {
    return 0;
  }
}

However, when comparing int values, there’s a much quicker way to do this:

int Compare(int a, int b) {
  return a - b;
}

That’s it.

Note: Care should be taken if a and/or b can come close to int.MaxValue or int.MinValue. In this case the results may not be what one wants (like if a = int.MinValue and b = 1 then the result will be int.MaxValue which is wrong obviously).