It’s somewhat hard for me to decide how unnatural a translation this is as I’m used to seeing it in ocaml. My concise dictionary doesn’t have a definition that fits this use well. My non-concise dictionary describes the history of the senses of the word as “exceedingly complex”.
It has been used as a translation of the French de since the 11th century and I think it gets some senses (eg derivation) from that. With a verb meaning create, this ocaml construction is fine in modern English (eg ‘make a string of an int’) and dates back a long way (OED offers a source from 893; this is sense I. [VII.] 20. a. in the second edition). So I think partly the question is whether omitting make in make_string_of_int (or String.make_of_int) is an acceptable abbreviation in programming.
It has been used as a translation of the French de since the 11th century and I think it gets some senses (eg derivation) from that. With a verb meaning create, this ocaml construction is fine in modern English (eg ‘make a string of an int’) and dates back a long way (OED offers a source from 893; this is sense I. [VII.] 20. a. in the second edition). So I think partly the question is whether omitting make in make_string_of_int (or String.make_of_int) is an acceptable abbreviation in programming.