Loop condition: why “not-equal” instead of “lower-than”

Question

I was assigned to work on an Android-Java (real-time game) project with a considerable (partially legacy) code base.

Most of the loops I see are like this (where mjk

Answer 1

The second form has one clear advantage: if you for some mistake manipulate i inside the loop, the first form will probably crash if i get's assigned to a value greater than mjk.length and the second form will simply ends the loop.

The only single advantage I can see in the second approach is that "!=" might run faster than "<" but I'm not even sure this happens at all (this might depend on the JVM implementation and the hardware itself.) But please notice that if you do something substancial inside the loop the difference will not be noticed at all since it's executed only once per iteration.

I would definitely use the second one cause it's much safer.