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There is a chapter in the Blue Book about how the GW-BASIC byte code is structured, and from what I understand it used pointers to lines, not just offsets? But I did not look too carefully (guess the answer is in the source code: https://gitlab.com/tkchia/GW-BASIC).

That book is full of interesting facts and fun low-level tricks for (GW-)BASIC programming. Available for download here: https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-gwbasic

Before reading that I never considered how primitive early BASICs were. There is a lot of linear-searching for things (variables, line-numbers) that has to be considered when optimizing.