I don't want it to coerce Ints to Strings. Far from that. What I do want is to be able to implement a generic datastructure for objects of type 'a, where 'a is any type and then be able to write functions/methods that take this structure with any type of objects and another that only takes structures of Ints. I want to be able to write a function that takes a list of 'a, a function of type 'a -> 'b and returns a list of 'b.

What I end up doing is either having to "reimplement" this very same function for each list type or implement one that takes a list of void pointers (sorry, objects), a function that accepts a void pointer and returns a void pointer and produce a list of void pointers. Which I will then typecast to whatever I think I've received. Either suffers the safety or the convenience. And why? Just because the excuse for a type system of Java/C# doesn't undestand the concept of type variables. Polymorphism? My foot, they don't even understand what does that mean!