Nearly everyone I speak to hates the unreachable error messages, by the way. It's not useless to have them but they can be utterly infuriating for exactly the

Nearly everyone I speak to hates the unreachable error messages, by the way. It's not useless to have them but they can be utterly infuriating for exactly the reason you mention since most projects have warnings-are-errors turned on. The way I shut it up in a class is usually by branching on the this pointer. Sneaky.