[zelphirkalt]

But how is that then used? If I maintain pointers for each part of a data structure on my stack, won't I have to linearly go through those pointers, to use them to lookup what they are pointing to? And surely it is not ergonomic or feasible to create a new word for something like each element of a 1000 by 1000 matrix?

[unnah]

You can put pointers inside data structures on the heap, similarly to what you would do in C. The functions that process those data structures only need local variables (or stack slots) for a few pointers, and with those pointers they can fetch more pointers from the data structures on the heap. In principle the entire program can be structured pretty much identically to C, although in Forth you would typically split the code into smaller functions, and often use the stack instead of local variables.