[chrisseaton]

I often see [a, b, c].sort[1] which I think is very neat.

[rubber_duck]

I'd say the only way this would be better than min/max solution is that you can't accidentally flip it when writing the code - but IMO both suck at expressing intent, clamp reads unambiguously.

[stickyricky]

Yes but its too many operations for such a simple problem. No need to overwork the system when two conditionals can solve the problem.

[nitrogen]

If you are writing code that is clamping a lot of numbers, the GC churn from building a new array every time might be a problem.

[chrisseaton]

Ideally the temporary array should optimise away.

[nitrogen]

Ideally, but so far my experiences with simple benchmarks and with ruby-prof have shown that CRuby doesn't make such optimizations:

https://repl.it/repls/GargantuanThistleLink

    Result from sort: 3 in 0.9785124980007822s
    Allocated 3000001 object(s)
    Result from ternary: 3 in 0.3205206830025418s
    Allocated 1 object(s)
    Result from clamp: 3 in 0.5030354310001712s
    Allocated 2 object(s)

Interestingly the ternary comparison is faster than clamp.