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A literal of the form v1.20.300.4000 is parsed as a string composed of characters with the specified ordinals. This provides an alternative, more readable way to construct strings, rather than use the somewhat less readable interpolation form "\x{1}\x{14}\x{12c}\x{fa0}".
This is useful for representing Unicode strings, and for comparing version ``numbers'' using the string comparison operators, cmp, gt, lt etc. If there are two or more dots in the literal, the leading v may be omitted.

   print v9786;              # prints UTF-8 encoded SMILEY, "\x{263a}"
   print v102.111.111;       # prints "foo"
   print 102.111.111;        # same

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The marginal benefits of v-strings were greatly outweighed by the potential for Surprise and Confusion.

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Note that since Perl 5.8.1 the single-number v-strings (like v65 ) are not v-strings before the => operator (which is usually used to separate a hash key from a hash value), instead they are interpreted as literal strings ('v65').