Actualy, there is a way, though it's somwhat odd. Instead of using lists, use version-strings. In recent (>5.6, IIRC) versions of perl, v1.2.3 eq chr(1).chr(2).chr(3) (the v is optional if there are more then two elements, but be warned that there is a (fairly large) size limit on the elements), so what you're doing there is equivlent to

$a = v1.2.3;
$b = v1.2.4;

if ($a lt $b) {
  print "a is less than b";
}
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