Problem with usort

Hi folks, Config is Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) PHP/4.4.1 mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.7i. If my usort callback has in it: if ($aday == $bday) {return 0;} else {return ($aday < $bday) ? -1 : 1;} everything works - lots of sort operations happen on the array (three elements) and it sorts correctly. If however, I change it to: $ret_val = 0; if ($aday == $bday) {$ret_val = 0;} else {$ret_val = ($aday < $bday) ? -1 : 1;} return ret_val; Then it does not sort correctly and only performs two sort operations (on a three element array). I must be missing something obvious. I'm not the most experienced PHP coder so perhaps some esoteric feature of the language has confounded me. Open to liberal use of the clue by four. :) Cheers! Jon