In computer programming, dead code is code in the source code of a program which is executed but whose result is never used in any other computation. The execution of dead code wastes computation time as its results are never used.
While the result of a dead computation may never be used, the dead code may raise exceptions or affect some global state, thus removal of such code may change the output of the program and introduce unintended bugs. Compiler optimizations are typically conservative in their approach to dead code removal if there is any ambiguity as to whether removal of the dead code will affect the program output.
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