If you try to use and output ^O while thinking you're outputting a literal control-O then you'll be in for a big surprise.
The language allows (length) 250 or so character variable names with few restrictions, so using single character names is probably a bug or at least bad style, so when the devs are looking for a class of global "internal-ish" variable names, how about those icky single character names that no one should be using? So that's how you end up with $^V being aliased to a string representation of the version of perl interpreter currently executing. You really shouldn't be using single character variable names so they've been repurposed and attempting to re-re-purpose them might be very exciting.
