Why is “echo foo | read a ; echo $a” not working as expected?

Question

I could replicate the problem with various shells under FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, and Solaris. It had me head-scratching for more than an hour, so I decided to post the question here

Answer 1

I came up with a solution that doesn't hide the variable values in a subshell, and that can also work with multiple values.

set `echo foo bar`
A=$1
B=$2