Is there a technical reason to use > (<) instead of != when incrementing by 1 in a 'for' loop?

Question

I almost never see a for loop like this:

for (int i = 0; 5 != i; ++i)
{}

Is there a technical reason to use >

Answer 1

There are several ways to write any kind of code (usually), there just happens to be two ways in this case (three if you count <= and >=).

In this case, people prefer > and < to make sure that even if something unexpected happens in the loop (like a bug), it won't loop infinitely (BAD). Consider the following code, for example.

for (int i = 1; i != 3; i++) {
    //More Code
    i = 5; //OOPS! MISTAKE!
    //More Code
}

If we used (i < 3), we would be safe from an infinite loop because it placed a bigger restriction.

Its really your choice whether you want a mistake in your program to shut the whole thing down or keep functioning with the bug there.

Hope this helped!