> > (and yes, that includes Smalltalk IDE's) > Patently false. It's a mathematical fact. Without type annotations, refactorings are never safe and need super

> > (and yes, that includes Smalltalk IDE's) > Patently false. It's a mathematical fact. Without type annotations, refactorings are never safe and need supervision from a human. Did you notice that the "Refactoring Browser" calls itself just that, not "Automatic"? Because it can't provide that guarantee. Even renaming a function is dangerous and can break a program when you don't have type annotations. I have a lot of respect for Smalltalk and the pioneering work it accomplished, but the refactoring browser was just a powerful string replacement engine, nothing more. Which is not a knock on the engineers and scientists who invented it: it simply, mathematically, could not do more than that.