You&#39;re right : that&#39;s true in the &quot;int&quot; case and I hadn&#39;t considered it.<div><br><div>But if you use the same trick for (&#39;a -&gt; float) or other types you can get a segfault :</div></div><div><br>

</div><div><div># external floatify : &#39;a -&gt; float = &quot;%identity&quot;;;</div><div>external floatify : &#39;a -&gt; float = &quot;%identity&quot;</div><div># floatify 0;;</div><div>Segmentation fault</div></div>

<div><br></div><div>Also there are other problems with &quot;intify&quot; that may be worse than segfaults : your application running with nonsense data and failing at an arbitrary later point. Though ocaml doesn&#39;t fail (in the current implementation, it would be unwise to assume that the GC/runtime will never check this), you get strange behavior with those integers-wich-are-not-integers :</div>

<div><br></div><div><div># let x = intify (1,2);;</div><div>val x : int = 70246988845964</div></div><div><div># x * 1 - x;;</div><div>- : int = 1</div></div>