Another pre-5.10 approach is returning the list of capture group contents from the regex in list context and assigning directly to named variables:

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $s = 'xxx foo , 987;-+--++-+%yyy';
 ;;
 my $sep = qr{ \s* [,;] \s* }xms;
 ;;
 my ($letters, $digits, $signs) =
   $s =~ m{ ([a-z]+) $sep (\d+) $sep ([-+]+) }xms;
 print qq{letters '$letters'  digits '$digits'  signs '$signs'};
"
letters 'foo'  digits '987'  signs '-+--++-+'
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Of course, this doesn't give you the  \g{X} etc. backreference capabilities, but that's life.