DevOps, CI/CD and Automation

So I need to pass a -D macro containing a space to my Sun Studio 12 C compiler running on Solaris 10 x86 using a korn shell.

I run:
cc -Xc ' -DXXX=long long' define.c

And all works well.

But I want to put the compiler options in an environmental variable so I try:
export ZZZ="-Xc ' -DXXX=long long'"
cc $ZZZ define.c

And it fails. XXX is not set. In fact the entire -D string ends up getting passed through to the linker phase.

I can do an alias:
alias cc="/opt/sunstudio12.1/bin/cc '-DXXX=long long'"
cc -Xc define.c

Which works. But I really want to use an env variable if possible. I tried different methods of escaping the string but no luck.