As I'm a C++ guy, I always shiver when anyone says "for clarity, initialize it in a separate statement".

Yeah, I'm not a C++ guy, but I second that and that's precisely the reason why I started this thread: I'm a Perl guy, and I think that an alternative syntax that would give improved visibility of the initialization bit would be nice, it would be very perlish. But then maybe I'm just going mad around a corner case.