GCC is taking steps towards C++11, which is probably why you now need to include cstddef in order to use the NULL constant. The preferred way in C++11 is to use the new nullptr keyword, which is implemented in GCC since version 4.6. nullptr is not implicitly convertible to integral types, so it can be used to disambiguate a call to a function which has been overloaded for both pointer and integral types:
void f(int x);
void f(void * ptr);
f(0); // Passes int 0.
f(nullptr); // Passes void * 0.