Is it a bad practice to place conditional statements inside iterations?

Question

So let's consider the case where there is the below snippet:

if(x == 0)
{
     for(var i = 0; i < 5; ++ i)
     {
         //do something  
     }
}
else
{
   for(var i = 0; i < 5; ++ i)
     {
         //do something different
     }
}

As you can see, both of the conditions iterate through the same for loop but perform different actions based on the condition. My question is, is it a bad practice to have something like this:

for(var i = 0; i < 5; ++ i)
{
     if(x == 0){
       // do something
     }else{
        // do something else
     }
}

The reason being that I think that this may be a bad practice is due to the fact that for every instance of the loop, a conditional check is being executed on it against the first snippet where he condition is checked first and then the loop is executed. Am I mistaken?

Answer 1

Unless you're writing code that must run at high speed and be super efficient, go for code readability over efficiency. In this case, I'd say the 2nd example is clearer as it's less code, and a commonly followed pattern.

I suppose another factor to consider though is that the 2nd example seems to imply that x might change value, whereas the 1st example doesn't. This would be worth putting a comment nearby explaining the choice.

My gut instinct would agree with you, that the 1st example would be more efficient, but in reality the compiler's optimisations are likely to make short work of examples like the above - they'll both likely be equal in performance.

Here's a pretty impressive list of optimisations that can be made on loops, to give you an idea, and also branch optimisation (see the answer), may have an effect if the loops run for many iterations.