My solution would be to side-step the question with some memoization.

my @Table;

{
  my @_Table;
  sub LoadTable {
    unless (@_Table) {
      local $/;
      @_Table = map {chomp; hex} split ' ', <DATA>;
      close DATA;
    }
    @Table = @_Table;
  }
}
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Issues with this? Well first of all you are assuming that DATA doesn't have too much in it, and you assume that it has something.

But still memoization is a good solution to many problems where you wouldn't have thought it applied at first....