Tag functions with shell options?

[Anthony Heading <aheading@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've hit a small shell-based problem, and I wonder if it's a common one...

My dearly beloved employers, or rather their technology guys, have come up with a
Unix application load/unload scheme.  And it works in a reasonably sensible way,
by defining shell functions which grub around in config files and then set
shell and environment variables appropriately.

The trouble is that these functions rely on sh-style word splitting, which I don't
have (or want) turned on by default. 

So I think I need some way of marking these functions to be interpreted with
SH_WORD_SPLIT turned on locally.  Or have I missed something simple?

Anthony