How do I programmatically return the max of two integers without using any comparison operators and without using if, else, etc?

Question

How do I programmatically return the maximum of two integers without using any comparison operators and without using if, else, etc?

Answer 1

Since this is a puzzle, solution will be slightly convoluted:

let greater x y = signum (1+signum (x-y))

let max a b = (greater a b)*a + (greater b a)*b

This is Haskell, but it will be the same in any other language. C/C# folks should use "sgn" (or "sign"?) instead of signum.

Note that this will work on ints of arbitrary size and on reals as well.