Why doesn't changing the pre to the post increment at the iteration part of a for loop make a difference?

Question

Why does this

 int x = 2;
    for (int y =2; y>0;y--){
        System.out.println(x + \" \"+ y + \" \");
        x++;
    }

prints the s

Answer 1

Because this:

int x = 2;
for (int y =2; y>0; y--){
    System.out.println(x + " "+ y + " ");
    x++;
}

Effectively gets translated by the compiler to this:

int x = 2;
int y = 2
while (y > 0){
    System.out.println(x + " "+ y + " ");
    x++;
    y--;
}

As you see, using y-- or --y doesn't result in any difference. It would make a difference if you wrote your loop like this, though:

int x = 2;
for (int y = 3; --y > 0;){
    System.out.println(x + " "+ y + " ");
    x++;
}

This would yield the same result as your two variants of the loop, but changing from --y to y-- here would break your program.