Help with Sorting

[rsherry8]

I am trying to understand how to sort an array in Python 3.x using the bulit in sort function. So I wrote the following code. However, it did does not work.

    a = [1,-2,3,-4,5,-6]
    sorted(a, cmp = numeric_compare ) 

where numeric_compare is defined as follows:

def numeric_compare(x, y):
    return abs(x) - abs(y)

What I want to do is sort the array by the absolute values of the numbers. I realize, in this case the array is already sorted in that order.

Bob