The following reply was made to PR bin/36444; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: christos@zoulas.com (Christos Zoulas)
To: Michael van Elst <mlelstv@serpens.de>, gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org
Cc: gnats-admin@NetBSD.org, netbsd-bugs@NetBSD.org
Subject: Re: bin/36444: flex generates bad C++ code
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2007 11:32:57 -0400

 On Jun 5,  5:17pm, mlelstv@serpens.de (Michael van Elst) wrote:
 -- Subject: Re: bin/36444: flex generates bad C++ code
 
 | On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 03:00:14PM +0000, Christos Zoulas wrote:
 | >  The problem should be fixed by changing:
 | >   	unsigned long size;
 | 
 | This can't be changed, but you can cast the value to yy_size_t
 | when passing it to yy_scan_bytes.
 | 
 | >  We could add a few more yy_scan_bytes() functions so that we have explicit
 | >  matches for unsigned long and long, but it is not worth the trouble. Passing
 | >  a long where an int is expected is not a good practice anyway.
 | 
 | What problem is this function overloading trying to solve?
 
 I forget the exact problem, but it had something to do with buffers being
 yy_size_t internally where some of the flex API's used int to pass values
 to them. This caused problems to another application. I did not want to
 cause an ABI change by s/int/yy_size_t/, so I added the overloading in c++.
 This has not caused a problem until now (when someone passed an unsigned
 long to a function and the overloading could not resolve it).
 
 christos