C99

I've been reading Linux kernel changes related to updating for C99 Designated Initializers (also called named struct initialisers). Does anyone know why these are a good idea and why you'd want to change / break your code to support these?

They work like this. A struct with two fields:

struct type_foo bar = {
  val1, 
  val2
};

is now (or can now be) written as

struct type_foo bar = {
  .field1 = val1,
  .field2 = val2
};

and I was just getting used to ignoring K&R C support ;)