Comment by 1313ed01
GW-BASIC, and probably other MS BASICs, only looked up destination lines once, then replaced the GOTO code with a direct pointer to the destination. Something similar may have been used for other symbols, but I don't remember for sure?
Guess the ZX BASIC did not do that, or it would have improved the measurements seen in the article?
BLUE Book of GW-BASIC is full of details and tricks like that and some of it probably is useful for other BASICs as well.