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

Yes; OpenMP doesn't parallelize loops with the != condition.

Answer 2

while (time != 6:30pm) {
    Work();
}

It is 6:31pm... Damn, now my next chance to go home is tomorrow! :)

This to show that the stronger restriction mitigates risks and is probably more intuitive to understand.

Answer 3

There are two related reasons for following this practice that both have to do with the fact that a programming language is, after all, a language that will be read by humans (among others).

(1) A bit of redundancy. In natural language we usually provide more information than is strictly necessary, much like an error correcting code. Here the extra information is that the loop variable i (see how I used redundancy here? If you didn't know what 'loop variable' means, or if you forgot the name of the variable, after reading "loop variable i" you have the full information) is less than 5 during the loop, not just different from 5. Redundancy enhances readability.

(2) Convention. Languages have specific standard ways of expressing certain situations. If you don't follow the established way of saying something, you will still be understood, but the effort for the recipient of your message is greater because certain optimisations won't work. Example:

Don't talk around the hot mash. Just illuminate the difficulty!

The first sentence is a literal translation of a German idiom. The second is a common English idiom with the main words replaced by synonyms. The result is comprehensible but takes a lot longer to understand than this:

Don't beat around the bush. Just explain the problem!

This is true even in case the synonyms used in the first version happen to fit the situation better than the conventional words in the English idiom. Similar forces are in effect when programmers read code. This is also why 5 != i and 5 > i are weird ways of putting it unless you are working in an environment in which it is standard to swap the more normal i != 5 and i < 5 in this way. Such dialect communities do exist, probably because consistency makes it easier to remember to write 5 == i instead of the natural but error prone i == 5.