As I'm developing, I like to experiment with forcing certain values in my shader code to something so I can see what's going on.

This would cause the GLSL compiler to optimize out certain uniforms making my game code itself crash, meaning if I change a tiny thing in my shader I have to comment out huge blocks in my C++ code as well, which is a nightmare.

I just want, for the sake of debugging, to disable GLSL compiler optimization. I read in many places that #pragma optimize(off) should do the trick. I place this at the top of my file but my GTX 480 still optimizes out unused uniforms.

Well my C++ code is built specifically to log an error and crash when I use bad parameters to help me catch bugs in the code.

I thought of another way, which I'm surprised works and isn't optimized out.

I write

max(0.0, min(0.0, uniformOrAttrGoesHere)) + 1.0 

to keep the uniform "used" but still forceable to be 1.0 if I just want to see some white pixels for example.