Why does a Java Compiler not produce an unreachable statement error for an unreachable then statement?

The behaviour is defined in the JLS description of unreachable statements:

The then-statement is reachable iff the if-then statement is reachable.

So the compiler determines that the then-statement (break;) is reachable, regardless of the condition in the if.

And a bit further, emphasis mine:

A basic for statement can complete normally iff at least one of the following is true:

• The for statement is reachable, there is a condition expression, and the condition expression is not a constant expression (§15.28) with value true.
• There is a reachable break statement that exits the for statement.

So the for can complete normally because the then-statement contains a break. As you noticed, it would not work if you replaced break with return.

The rationale is explained towards the end of the section. In substance, if has a special treatment to allow constructs such as:

if(DEBUG) { ... }

where DEBUG may be a compile time constant.

As explained in my answer to a similar question, the specific construct if(compile-time-false) is exempt from the unreachability rules as an explicit backdoor. In this case, the compiler treats your break as reachable because of that.

From the JLS

An if-then statement can complete normally if at least one of the following is true:

> The if-then statement is reachable and the condition expression is not a constant expression whose value is true.

> The then-statement can complete normally.

So if(false) is allowed.

This ability to "conditionally compile" has a significant impact on, and relationship to, binary compatibility. If a set of classes that use such a "flag" variable are compiled and conditional code is omitted, it does not suffice later to distribute just a new version of the class or interface that contains the definition of the flag. A change to the value of a flag is, therefore, not binary compatible with pre-existing binaries . (There are other reasons for such incompatibility as well, such as the use of constants in case labels in switch statements;)

Basically, unreachable code is detected by analyzing the program statically without actually running the code. While the condition will be checked at runtime. So, when this analysis takes place it does not actually look in to the condition but just check that break; is accessible(reachable) via if.