If your target audience is C, packing 3 values into one might even be the easiest to reason about, you get a single value that you can compare with the usual < and > etc. operators.
I don't understand your exact point, but the GNU C library ships with the strverscmp() and versionsort() functions, which do the same thing as `ls -v`.
The language already has an incredibly simple facility to compare version numbers (that GP mentions, but also there's macros), but you want to do it in a more complex way?
