I, too, would be inclined toward something like the initial form of the code given in the OP for reasons of readability and maintainability. However, here's another way to glue everything together:

>perl -wMstrict -le
"my @ranges = ('15', '28-31', '3-4', '40', '17-19');
 my ($total_min, $total_max);
 ;;
 m{ \A       (\d+)   (?{ $total_min += $^N })
       (?: - (\d+))? (?{ $total_max += $^N })
    \z
  }xmsg for @ranges;
 ;;
 print qq{total between $total_min and $total_max};
"
total between 103 and 109
[download]

Update:

I would much prefer to be able to write the whole body of the of loop in the above example in the form:
    $total_min += SELF_CONTAINED_FUNCTIONAL_STATEMENT;
    $total_max += SELF_CONTAINED_FUNCTIONAL_STATEMENT;

This seems to come a bit closer to what smls asked for (but I like BrowserUk's solution better!) and has a bit of input validation:

perl -wMstrict -le
"my @ranges = qw(15 28-31 3-4 40 17-19  99- -99 -99- x x-x);
 my ($total_min, $total_max);
 ;;
 my $extract_ranges = qr{ \A (\d+) (?: - (\d+))? \z }xms;
 for (@ranges) {
   $total_min += /$extract_ranges/ && $1;
   $total_max += /$extract_ranges/ && $^N;
   }
 ;;
 print qq{total between $total_min and $total_max};
"
total between 103 and 109
[download]

(Update: Now that I look back on this thread, my second approach looks rather like kennethk's first idea.)