[jimm]

Yes, in theory. In practice, you'd not only remove this function but all of its calls. When somebody down the road realizes that they want this function back, they have to (A) realize it's in the VC history and (B) not only get back the function but all the calling points. That is so much of a pain and potentially error-prone that leaving this function in for a while with a comment might be the more practical approach.

[pklausler]

On the other hand, it may no longer be called from every place where it should be. I've found that it's better to document what was wrong with the overall approach, scrape the dead code from the source base, and move on. Barnacles like these accumulate over time otherwise.