unwanted expansion of variable with nested strings

[Mike Frysinger]

ignoring the fact that i can pass in variables to gawk using the '-v' option, 
i'm wondering if this is a bug in how bash expands variables to pass to 
programs ... i couldnt pick out anything under EXPANSION, but that's probably 
just because i missed it ;)

take for example:
$ foo="a b c"
$ gawk 'BEGIN {foo="'${foo}'"}'
gawk: BEGIN {foo="a
gawk:            ^ unterminated string

this being because bash executed:
argv[0] = gawk
argv[1] = BEGIN {foo="a
argv[2] = b
argv[3] = c"}

when really i wanted:
argv[0] = gawk
argv[1] = BEGIN {foo="a b c"}

so if i quote ${foo} like so:
$ gawk 'BEGIN {foo="'"${foo}"'"}'
it'll work in this case, but then fail if foo contains newlines:
foo="a
b
c"
-mike