Esteemed monks

I stumbled over this 2 year old reddit-question from a user "onion" and am not too convinced about the answers given.

Is using Regexp::Grammars really the only way to do it? Seems like overkill...

Suppose I have this regular expression: 
my $re = qr{(\w+)(\s*\d+\s*)*};
How do I get every match matched by the second group?

[download]
Using the regular numeric variables only gets me the last value matched, not the whole list: 
my $re = qr{(\w+)(\s*\d+\s*)*};

my $str = 'a 1 2 3 b 4 5 6';

while ($str =~ /$re/g) {
    say "$&: $1 $2";
}

# output:
# a 1 2 3 : a 3 
# b 4 5 6: b 6

[download]

How do I get every number that follows a letter in this example, and not just the last one?

EDIT

Bonus question:

How do I do it if I have named groups? I.e. my $re = qr{(?<letter>\w+)(?<digit>\s*\d+\s*)*};

In reply to How do I reference repeated capture groups? by TIOOWTDI

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