performance - Does writing i != 0 compare faster or slower than i > 0 for a positive integer?

Imagine I have a program that needs to check if a variable i is greater than zero. i is always positive, so saying that i > 0 is equivalent to saying i != 0.

Is there a performance difference between those two expressions and why?

I am aware that there isn't a noticable performance difference, this is more of a philosophical question.

Answer

I don't think it's measurably different, but contrary to popular wisdom, I'm going to tell you to use != rather than > or < on the grounds that the former is a more general operation, and if you were going to convert your code to C++ and use iterators instead of pointers, not all iterators would support < or > (but all of them would support !=).