Rather x <= 1 or x < 2?

Question

Say we have x which is an integer.

is there any reason to prefer x <= 1 or x < 2? I mean if one is maybe faster or more readable.

This question is language independant, meaning if the answer is different for two different languages, please let me know.

Answer 1

Usually when I loop over a zero-based collection, I use i < col.Length, as it is more readable than i <= col.Length - 1. If I am iterating from 1 to x, I use for (int i = 1; i <= x ...), as it is more readable than < x + 1. Both of theese instructions have the same time requirement (at least on x86 architecture), so yes, it is only about readability.

Answer 2

I would say that it depends on the requirements of your software, was it specified that x needs to be one or less or was it specified that x needs to be less than two?

If you ever changed x to be of a number type that allows decimal points, which way would work best then? This happens more often than you think and can introduce some interesting bugs.