Biggest and smallest of four integers (No arrays, no functions, fewest 'if' statements)

Question

You see, I\'ve self-taught myself C++ (not completely, I\'m still procrastinating -_-). So, now I started university and they\'re teaching C and they made us do a program of

Answer 1

Here is a solution with no if or elseif or function or macro, but using bit-shift and subtraction instead; only using a single for loop:

#include 
int main(){

  int num , max, min;

  printf("Enter four numbers: ");
  scanf("%d", &num);
  max = min = num;

  for(int i = 0; i < 3; i++)
  { 
    scanf("%d", &num);
    max = max * (1 - ( (max-num) >> 31) )
        + num *      ( (max-num) >> 31);
    min = min * (1 - ( (num-min) >> 31) )
        + num *      ( (num-min) >> 31);
  }

  printf("\n%d %d", max, min);
  return 0;
}

The (max-num) >> 31) operation captures the sign of the difference, which when multiplied by the second number yields the minimum value of the comparison.

This comes from an old SQL coding trick from the days before there was a CASE WHEN construct in that language.