dead code

Noun

1. Instructions that, when executed, have no effect on the running of the program.
   • Much dead code elimination is actually done on intermediate representations of your code, which may contain unnecessary intermediate calculations[…] - 2006, William Von Hagen, The definitive guide to GCC:
2. A portion of source code that will never be executed as part of the running program.
   • Many software projects contain much dead code in the form of deprecated functions.
   • If the test data is exhaustive you can even locate dead code: program code that is never executed. - 2003, Diomidis Spinellis, Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective, Addison-Wesley Professional, →ISBN, page 372:

   Synonyms: unreachable code