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Puzzle : Sorting 3 Integers - Easy

This is a pretty silly question I came up with.

Problem : You are given 3 integers a,b,c. You are given 2 functions, "int max(int,int)" and "void print(int)". Using these 2 function and these only, print the numbers in increasing order. You're allowed to use math operators, but NOT programming language constructs like "if", "for", "while", including the ternary operation etc

So here's the solution. Again, beware of integer overflows.
import random
a,b,c = [random.randint(-100,100) for i in range(3)]
print a,b,c
#the actual solution
mx = max(a,max(b,c)) # max of a,b,c
mn = -max(-a,max(-b,-c)) # min of a,b,c, lol! :D
mid = a+b+c-mn-mx # middle term
print mn,mid,mx
view raw Sort 3 numbers hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The idea here is if we negate the number, we can use the max() function to find the minimum number! Nifty eh?

We don't need to use the auxiliary variables, those were added for clarity. Do you have an alternate solution? I'd love to see it. Leave a Comment.

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