program surgery vs. type safety

[Jeremy Fincher]

aaron at reportlab.com (Aaron Watters) wrote in message news:<9a6d7d9d.0311120822.553cd347 at posting.google.com>...
> If I were forced to do the transformation in a type safe way
> I would not be able to do as much experimentation and backtracking
> because each step between type safe snapshots that could be tested
> would be too painful and expensive to throw away and repeat.

This entire post is the "musing" of a dynamic typing enthusiast and
primarily subsists of simply assuming the point you're apparently
attempting to prove, that dynamic typing allows you to do what you're
doing, and static typing would not.

I am curious, however -- what are these "type unsafe" stages you have
to go through to refactor your program?  I've refactored my personal
project several times and haven't yet gone through what I'd consider a
type-unsafe stage, where I'm *fundamentally* required to use
operations that aren't type-safe.

Jeremy