How can PHP developers optimize their code to efficiently calculate the distance between two numbers?

When calculating the distance between two numbers in PHP, developers can optimize their code by using the abs() function to get the absolute difference between the two numbers. This eliminates the need for conditional statements to handle negative values and simplifies the calculation process.

$num1 = 10;
$num2 = 5;

$distance = abs($num1 - $num2);

echo "The distance between $num1 and $num2 is: $distance";