If you read the colorforth source (there’s only around 1000 instructions of assembly, it’s not a long read), there’s a real sense that much of the design (pretokenization, color tags, etc) are built around the punchline of a single (with rep prefix) instruction being used to linear-search the dictionary — going to trivial hardware-supported data structures here constrains the implementation a bunch, but there’s magic in self-imposed constraints.