Is this an "It annoys me because"

1. it doesn't look elegant
2. my application needs it to be performant and even a short loop isn't
3. some other reason I'm going to tell you about

If it is case 1 then I suspect you are out of luck. The only other ways I can think of doing it are even worse, or hardware dependent, or are a maintenance nightmare.

For case 2 there are techniques like binary searches that maybe can run faster or a really nasty looking series of if statements that amount to unrolling the while loop.