Should one use < or <= in a for loop
- by Eugene Katz
If you had to iterate through a loop 7 times, would you use:
for (int i = 0; i < 7; i++)
or:
for (int i = 0; i <= 6; i++)
There are two considerations:
performance
readability
For performance I'm assuming Java or C#. Does it matter if "less than" or "less than or equal to" is used? If you have insight for a different language, please indicate which.
For readability I'm assuming 0-based arrays.
UPD: My mention of 0-based arrays may have confused things. I'm not talking about iterating through array elements. Just a general loop.
There is a good point below about using a constant to which would explain what this magic number is. So if I had "int NUMBER_OF_THINGS = 7" then "i <= NUMBER_OF_THINGS - 1" would look weird, wouldn't it.
