Different types of comparables

Question

when implementing the comparator interface to achieve natural ordering of objects :

say if we had the class Account:

class Account
{
   Account(String name, int id) 
   int balance() 
   void deposit(int n)
}

we wanted to sort the Account balances of two accounts in order

whats the diffrence between these two methods?

public class comparebalances implements Comparable <Account>
{

     public int compare (Account acc1, Account acc2)
     {
       return acc1.balance()-acc2.balance();
     }

}

public class comparebalances implements Comparable <Account>
{

     public int compare (Account acc1, Account acc2)
     {
         if (acc1.balance()> acc2.balance())
            return 1;
         else if (acc1.balance()< acc2.balance())
            return -1;
         else if (acc1.balance()==acc2.balance())
            return 0;
     }

}

Answer 1

The second one is safer, as the first one can provide wrong results for extreme values (integer overflow).