If I have x and y coordinates for triangle corners A, B, and C, I want to know which of the six orderings of {A, B, C} put the shortest side of the triangle between the first two vertices in the ordering, and the second shortest side between the last two. I know how to solve this, but not in a way that isn't clumsy and inelegant and all around ugly. My favorite language is Ruby, but I respect all of them.
As the third side of a triangle cannot be deduced from the other two, you must compute the three distances.
As the three points may require to be permuted in one of six ways, you cannot work this out with a decision tree that has less than three levels (two levels can distinguish at most four cases).
Hence, compute the three distances and sort them increasingly using the same optimal decision tree as here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22112521/1196549 (obviously their A, B, C correspond to your distances). For every leaf of the tree, determine what permutation of your points you must apply.
For instance, if you determine |AB|<|CA|<|BC|, you must swap A and B. Solve all six cases similarly.
Doing this you will obtain maximally efficient code.
If you are completely paranoid like I am, you can organize the decision tree in such a way that the cases that require a heavier permutation effort are detected in two tests rather than three.