Writing the value to the variable is deemed part of the constructor instead of the instantiation.
You could get around this using a static member function to set all such values, that way you could have static members set to default values without a class instance.

I'm not completely happy with the current behaviour as two elements of a single line are treated in very different ways without this being intuitively clear. Of course it could be argued that if this bothers us we simply shouldn't do it.

Kas.