File I/O And Registry :: Getting Constant Data Into Application?

Whats the most efficient way to read in moderately large data tables of constants? Im talking about maybe a few hundred items in a vector, or some 6 x 6 or 8 x 10 tables of numbers or strings, that kind of thing. (Im aware that they arent really stored in two dimensions.)In the old pre-Windows versions of Basic, wed use READ and DATA statements.In VB, we can read from an external file. I dont like to do this because something might happen to the file.

The resource file is another option. The setup is tricky, but once you get it its simple to maintain. It does involve reading strings and splitting them up to get numbers, which should be slow.Then theres the brute force method, where you just fill in the array in the source, you know,x() = {303, 279, 274, 268,} and so on for many continued lines. Some work to get everything in the right place, but one time only. I suppose that this makes the executable bigger.