[Haskell-cafe] Bibliographic references on advantages of functional languages for refactoring

[Nicola Gigante]

Hi all,

I’m writing my master thesis, which is not itself about functional programming but 
I use Haskell as the language chosen for the implementation of whatever I’m
talking about.

To motivate the choice more than “I like the language” I’m arguing that
since I’m implementing experimental stuff and I’ll need to change the code
and refactor very often, a strongly typed language is what I need.

I wrote this sentence:
"Strongly-typed programming eases the refactoring process by leveraging 
the compiler to spot wrong transformations before they turn into runtime bugs”

Since this thesis is not itself about functional programming this sentence needs
to be backed by something. In other words I need to cite some published paper
where this is said/surveyed/proved/whatever.

So the question: can you help me find referentiable published work relative to
how strongly-typed functional programming eases refactoring?
A survey or some case-study report or some functional pearl, dunno.

Thank you very much in advance,

Nicola