bash: combine arrays with weird substitution/references

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi all.

I'm trying to finish a bash script with the following elements:

ARRAY[0]="blah $ITEM blah blah"
ARRAY[1]="blah blah $ITEM blah bluh"
#ARRAY[n]="...."
# ...the ARRAY elements represent a variable but defined
#    syntax and they're all hard-coded in the script.

#(...)

ITEMS='1.0 2.3 -4.0'
#ITEMS=' .... '
# ...the ITEMS 'vector' comes from the command line
(...)

ARRAY[@] and ITEMS should have to get finally combined into NEWARRAY as detailed:

NEWARRAY[0]=blah 1.0 blah blah"
#(as ARRAY[0], but substituted with 1st item)
NEWARRAY[1]="blah 2.3 blah blah"
#(as ARRAY[0], but substituted with 2nd item)
NEWARRAY[2]="blah -4.0 blah blah"
#(as ARRAY[0], but substituted with 3rd item)
#-------------------
NEWARRAY[3]="blah  blah 1.0 blah bluh"
NEWARRAY[4]="blah blah 2.3 blah bluh"
NEWARRAY[5]="blah blah -4.0 blah bluh"
# (as ARRAY[1], but substituted)
# (...)

I think that the combination issue is not a mayor problem as it could be (naively?) resolved with 2 loops:

 c0=0; while [ $c0 -lt ${#ARRAY[@]} ]; do
    for elem in $ITEM; do
         #....???....???....
    done
    let "c0+=1"
done

Nevertheless the main problem to me is to get the $ITEMS values correctly referenced (if possible) within NEWARRAY during execution time. Anyway, I'm not sure if the whole stuff is well set...

Any help will be (desperately) welcome...

Y.

2 
me@tinybird:~$ ARRAY[0]="blah $ITEM blah blah"
me@tinybird:~$ echo ${ARRAY[0]}
blah blah blah
me@tinybird:~$ ARRAY[0]='blah $ITEM blah blah'
me@tinybird:~$ echo ${ARRAY[0]}
blah $ITEM blah blah
me@tinybird:~$ ITEM=1.0
me@tinybird:~$ echo ${ARRAY[0]}
blah $ITEM blah blah
me@tinybird:~$ eval echo ${ARRAY[0]}
blah 1.0 blah blah
me@tinybird:~$ eval 'NEWARRAY[5]=${ARRAY[0]}'
me@tinybird:~$ eval echo ${NEWARRAY[5]}
blah 1.0 blah blah
3

Perfect!

Thanks!