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Superfluous code and values may occur in the form of dead code, code that has no effect, and unused values in program logic.

Code that is never executed is known as dead code. Typically, the presence of dead code indicates that a logic error has occurred as a result of changes to a program or to the program's environment. Dead code is often optimized out of a program during compilation. However, to improve readability and ensure that logic errors are resolved, dead code should be identified, understood, and removed.

Code that is executed but does not perform any action, or that has an unintended effect, most likely results from a coding error and can result in cause unexpected behavior. Statements or expressions that have no effect should be identified and removed from code. Most modern compilers can warn about code that has no effect.

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This noncompliant code example demonstrates how dead code can be introduced into a program [Fortify 06]. :

public int func(boolean condition) {
    int x = 0;
    if (condition) {
        x = foo();
        /* Process x */
        return x;
    }
    /* ... */
    if (x != 0) {
        /* This code is never executed */
    }
    return x;
}

The condition in the second if statement, (x != 0), will never evaluate to true because the only path where x can be assigned a non-zero nonzero value ends with a return statement.

Compliant Solution

Remediation of dead code requires the programmer to determine not only why the code is never executed but also whether the code should have been executed, and then to resolve that situation appropriately. This compliant solution assumes that the dead code should have executed and consequently , removes the return from the body of the first conditional statement.

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In this example, the length() function is used to limit the number of times the function string_loop() will iterate iterates. The condition of the if statement inside the loop evaluates to true when the current index is the length of str. However, because i is always strictly less than str.length(), that will never happen.

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public int string_loop(String str) {
  for (int i=0; i < str.length(); i++) {
    /* ... */
    if (i==str.length()-1) {
      /* This code is now executed */
    }
  }
  return 0;
}

Noncompliant Code Example (Code with

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No Effect)

In this noncompliant code example, the comparison of s to t has no effect.:

String s;
String t;

// ...

s.equals(t);

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In this compliant solution, the result of the comparison is printed out.:

String s;
String t;

// ...

if (s.equals(t)) {
  System.out.println("Strings equal");
} else {
  System.out.println("Strings unequal");
}

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In this example, p2 is assigned the value returned by bar(), but that value is never used.:

int p1 = foo();
int p2 = bar();

if (baz()) {
  return p1;
}
else {
  p2 = p1;
}
return p2;

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In exceptional situations, dead code may make software resilient to future changes. An example of this is the presence of a default case in a switch statement even though all possible switch labels are specified (see MSC60-JG. Strive for logical completeness for an illustration of this example).

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Code and values that have no effect can be detected by suitable static analysis.

Related Guidelines

Bibliography

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