Refactor sort_ascend Utility Function to precisely sort decimal numbers

[mohammedelgammal]

sort_ascend function needs to be refactored by removing int cast of return value and compare the two values and return 1 when a > b or 0 if a == b and -1 if a < b to prevent losing precision in inputs like {1.2, 1.5, 1.3, 1.8, 1.7} won't be sorted correctly as they all evaluates to zeros