[blub]

I don't think there are many people that have debugged a class that used free instead of delete as there is simply no reason to write the word "free" in a C++ code base.

Even if this somehow happened, allocators include protection at least in debug mode that will let you know when you're doing something obviously wrong.

Writing int won't break your program, I don't see why it would, unless you're making assumptions about range - which you shouldn't. If you need an integer of a certain length there is stdint.h