Why class data members can't be initialized by direct initialization syntax?

Question

I am curious to know that why class' data members can't be initialized using () syntax? Consider following example:

#include <iostream>
class test
{
    public:
        void fun()
        {
            int a(3);
            std::cout<<a<<'\n';
        }
    private:
        int s(3);    // Compiler error why???
};
int main()
{
    test t;
    t.fun();
    return 0;
}

The program fails in compilation & gives following errors.

11  9 [Error] expected identifier before numeric constant

11  9 [Error] expected ',' or '...' before numeric constant

Why? What is the reason? What the C++ standard says about initialization of class data members? Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

Early proposals leading to the feature's introduction explain that this is to avoid parsing problems.

Here's just one of the examples presented therein:

Unfortunately, this makes initializers of the “( expression-list )” form ambiguous at the time that the declaration is being parsed:

struct S {
    int i(x); // data member with initializer
    // ...
    static int x;
};

struct T {
    int i(x); // member function declaration
    // ...
    typedef int x;
};

One possible solution is to rely on the existing rule that, if a declaration could be an object or a function, then it’s a function:

struct S {
    int i(j); // ill-formed...parsed as a member function,
              // type j looked up but not found
    // ...
    static int j;
};

A similar solution would be to apply another existing rule, currently used only in templates, that if T could be a type or something else, then it’s something else; and we can use “typename” if we really mean a type:

struct S {
    int i(x); // unabmiguously a data member
    int j(typename y); // unabmiguously a member function
};

Both of those solutions introduce subtleties that are likely to be misunderstood by many users (as evidenced by the many questions on comp.lang.c++ about why “int i();” at block scope doesn’t declare a default-initialized int).

The solution proposed in this paper is to allow only initializers of the “= initializer-clause” and “{ initializer-list }” forms. That solves the ambiguity problem in most cases. [..]