The Debian community will know that squeeze is version 6 and sarge is 3.1. Similarly the Ubuntu community will know that natty-narwhal (natty) is 11.04 and hardy-heron (hardy) is 8.04.
If I asked a question about Windows 6.1.7601 or 6.0.6002 would you know which is on topic ?
The important thing is that their respective communities know what they mean. It's not broken so don't try and fix it.