I'm not sure why you wanted the "new Shred" instantiation there... I
think instantiation is implicit.
I think it was a attempt to get around the issue with instantiating non-primitive static objects.
It's not clear to me why your version would work or why Atte's original one used to work in the last version of ChucK; Shreds aren't primitives. It's cool that it does work now but but I don't understand why this is a exception.
Yours,
Kas.