[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.