Wouldnt it be better to just ommit those? they dont have any effect right? (except calls and increment/decrement)

not sure if we should waste resources assigning those statements to local ____

@lolleko Expressions may have side effects (e.g. calls) deeply nested inside them, for example a quite common pattern: a ? foo() : bar(). Of course it's possible to traverse it and only emit when there are possible side effects, but IMO it might not worth it.

Okay! People probably don't add useless statements like "hello"; !myBool;... to their code anyway.

Simple literals are pretty much the only thing guaranteed to not have side effects. Even something like

-a;

could invoke metamethods. Since having simple literals as statements isn't something people are likely to do, it doesn't really seem worth the extra logic.