Functions with generic parameter types

Overloading is typically the bugaboo of type-inferenced languages (at least when, like F#, the type system isn't powerful enough to contain type-classes). There are a number of choices you have in F#:

• Use overloading on methods (members of a type), in which case overloading works much like as in other .Net languages (you can ad-hoc overload members, provided calls can be distinguished by the number/type of parameters)
• Use "inline", "^", and static member constraints for ad-hoc overloading on functions (this is what most of the various math operators that need to work on int/float/etc.; the syntax here is weird, this is little-used apart from the F# library)
• Simulate type classes by passing an extra dictionary-of-operations parameter (this is what INumeric does in one of the F# PowerPack libraries to generalize various Math algorithms for arbitrary user-defined types)
• Fall back to dynamic typing (pass in an 'obj' parameter, do a dynamic type test, throw a runtime exception for bad type)

For your particular example, I would probably just use method overloading:

type MathOps =
    static member sqrt_int(x:int) = x |> float |> sqrt |> int
    static member sqrt_int(x:int64) = x |> float |> sqrt |> int64

let x = MathOps.sqrt_int 9
let y = MathOps.sqrt_int 100L

This works:

type T = T with
    static member ($) (T, n:int  ) = int   (sqrt (float n))
    static member ($) (T, n:int64) = int64 (sqrt (float n))

let inline sqrt_int (x:'t) :'t = T $ x

It uses static constraints and overloading, which makes a compile-time lookup on the type of the argument.

The static constraints are automatically generated in presence of an operator (operator $ in this case) but it can always be written by hand:

type T = T with
    static member Sqr (T, n:int  ) = int   (sqrt (float n))
    static member Sqr (T, n:int64) = int64 (sqrt (float n))

let inline sqrt_int (x:'N) :'N = ((^T or ^N) : (static member Sqr: ^T * ^N -> _) T, x)

More about this here.