Marshal and Polymorphism

[Jonathan Bryant <jtbryant@valdosta.edu>]

I know the subjects of the questions I ask on this list must seem all
over the map, but I'm working on a large project with many different
parts.  Anyway, on to my question :).

I'm trying to write a disk bound hashtable.  I'm doing this because I
have to store somewhere between 1,000,000,000 - 2,000,000,000 (no, that
is NOT a typo) words and their corresponding index numbers, as well as
the documents they appeared in (20,000,000,000+) and frequency
information.  My question is this:

If I make the module have

type = ('a, 'b) t

in the module definition, can I use

(Marshal.from_string ... : 'a)

and get whatever 'a was defined as in the definition.  For example, if
it was a (string * int) t, would the function return a string?  Or would
this be redundant (since Marshal.from_string already returns 'a)?

-- 
*=========================*
|Jonathan Bryant          |
|Valdosta State University|
|Information Technology   |
|System Operations        |
|-------------------------|
|jtbryant@valdosta.edu    |
|x6358                    |
*=========================*