Unfortunately eval in a shell script has an effect on the semantics but is not necessary to do some kind of parsing of the contents of a variable, unlike Python

Unfortunately eval in a shell script has an effect on the semantics but is not necessary to do some kind of parsing of the contents of a variable, unlike Python or Perl or JavaScript. A $goo line (without quotes) will already do word splitting, though it won't do another layer of variable expansion and unquoting, for which you'll need eval "$goo" (This time with quotes).