Nothing strange with that loop. It's a one-bit-at-a-time loop, that is quite common if either writing a running light (walk the LED from D0 to D7) or when counting number of bits non-zero in a variable.

If i is an 8-bit variable, it will iterate the values 0x01, 0x02, 0x04, 0x08, 0x10, 0x20, 0x40, 0x80 and break when that lonely bit gets shifted out into the void. With a 16-bit i, it will iterate 16 times instead.

Remember that C don't need a comparison operator for logic expressions. It's just a question if the expression is zero or non-zero.

so:

char *p = NULL;
int i = 0;
if (!p) {
    printf("was NULL pointern");
}
if (p) {
    printf("was non-NULL pointern");
}
if (i) {
    printf("was non-zero integern");
}
if (!i) {
    printf("was zero integern");
}

That's also why you can write code like:

int a = 5;
int b = 10;
int same = a == b;

A comparison in C isn't a magic datatype "bool" - it's just a numeric expression that is zero if the comparison is false. And since there isn't a forced bool data type, if statements don't require any comparison at all - just an expression that is zero or non-zero.