Shell Programming and Scripting

Yes, set -- arg... goes way back and is required by the standards. And, if you don't want to set your positional parameters, something else that goes way back and is also required by the standards is read and, if you don't want to use a pipeline to feed it input from echo or printf, here-documents also go way back and are also required by the standards:

Code:

$ JIOO=hello.one.two.three
$ 
$ IFS='.' read var1 var2 leftover <<EOF
$J100
EOF
$ echo "$var1"
hello
$ echo "$var2"
one
$ echo "$leftover"
two.three
$

IFS, read, and here-documents are all part of the shell programming language and never require any external utilities to get the job done (unless, of course, you perform a command substitution in the body of the here-document).

Here-strings (i.e. <<< "string") are recent additions to a few shells and are allowed as an extension to the standards, but are not required by the standards.