Sorting Algorithm and Complexity | Dataford Interview Questions

At Impossible Foods, product event streams often need deterministic ordering before downstream processing. Implement a sorting algorithm of your choice in Python, and return the sorted array.

Choose a standard comparison-based sort such as merge sort, quicksort, or heap sort. Your solution must sort the input in ascending order and handle duplicate values and negative numbers.

Formal Specification

Write a function that takes one parameter:

nums: a list of integers

Return:

A new list containing the same integers in ascending order

Constraints

0 <= len(nums) <= 10^5
-10^9 <= nums[i] <= 10^9
The output must be a new sorted list
Do not use built-in sorting helpers such as sort() or sorted()

Function Signature

def sort_numbers(nums):

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