Why does sorting a JS array of numbers with < work?

Question

When sorting an array of numbers in JavaScript, I accidentally used < instead of the usual - -- but it still works. I wonder why?

Ex

Answer 1

After my initial comment, I wondered a little bit about how easy it is to find arrays for which this sorting method fails.

I ran an exhaustive search on arrays of length up to 8 (on an alphabet of size the size of the array), and found nothing. Since my (admittedly shitty) algorithm started to be too slow, I changed it to an alphabet of size 2 and found that binary arrays of length up to 10 are all sorted properly. However, for binary arrays of length 11, many are improperly sorted, for instance [0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0].

// Check if 'array' is properly sorted using the "<" comparator function
function sortWorks(array) {
    let sorted_array = array.sort(function(n1, n2) {
        return n1 < n2;
    });
    for (let i=0; i

I'm getting some weird false-positives for some reason though, not sure where my mistake is.

---

EDIT:

After checking for a little while, here's a partial explanation on why OP's "wrong" sorting method works for lengths <=10 and for lengths >=11: it looks like (at least some) javascript implementations use InsertionSort if the array length is short (length <= 10) and QuickSort otherwise. It looks like QuickSort actively uses the "-1" outputs of the compare function while InsertionSort does not and relies only on the "1" outputs.

Source: here, all thanks to the original author.