If an interrupt causing overflow would occur between reading
_buffer_overflow and clearing it, this overflow condition would be
immediately cleared and never be returned by overflow().
By only clearing the overflow flag if an overflow actually occurred,
this problem goes away (worst case overflow() returns false even though
an overflow _just_ occurred, but then the next call to overflow() will
return true).
This prevents interrupts from triggering when the SoftwareSerial
instance is not even listening.
Additionally, this removes the need to disable interrupts in
SoftwareSerial::listen, since no interrupts are active while it touches
the variables.
The current check is still always false when the old check was, but
additionally it will not disable the interrupts when they were never
enabled (which shouldn't matter much, but this is more consistent).
In this case, SoftwareSerial::begin will not have enabled the
interrupts, so better not allow the SoftwareSerial instance to enter the
listening state either.
Before enabling interupts, begin would see if the given receive pin
actually has an associated PCINT register. If not, the interrupts would
not be enabled.
Now, the same check is done, but when no register is available, the rx
parameters are not loaded at all (which in turn prevents the interrupt
from being enabled). This allows all code to use the same "is rx
enabled" (which will be added next).