It's really useful if you want a type to which you can cast any (non-float) primitive value and know that you can cast it back to the same value you had before.

It's really useful if you want a type to which you can cast any (non-float) primitive value and know that you can cast it back to the same value you had before. I've used it as the cell type for a Forth interpreter, for example (where cells have to be able to represent addresses as well as integers). It's probably particularly not useful for general applications programming.