Talk:Symbolic programming

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Clarify and add context

Well, I've tried, but I never was a geek, despite a long career in IT. Hopefully I've made it accessible to the non-expert, and if I've introduced any errors, I'm sure there are thousands of editors who will correct them Chrismorey (talk) 01:37, 7 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Symbolic language is a middle level language between the machine language and high level langauge. it adopts mnemonic codes to represent machine instructions. symbolic language is also machine dependent. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.75.200.144 (talk) 20:28, 7 April 2015 (UTC) (it follows a set of steps ) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.137.110.64 (talk) 21:32, 13 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

How is this different than the "Homoiconicity" and "Metaprogramming" Pages

Should we merge this page with the aforementioned? 173.66.145.78 (talk) 05:18, 5 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, I think the primary definition on this page is just wrong. Symbolic programming, as I encountered the term in PL research and commercial compiler engineering, means programming primarily with symbols, not names. This is business as usual in most compilers (and was popularized as far back as Lisp), where a symbol is a single canonical object that stands for something in the domain, such as a function or a type in a compiler. When you use pointer equivalence instead of name comparisons, and you use interning not just as a space optimization, you're practicing symbolic programming. It's not a very exciting definition because almost all programs do this to some extent. [adonovan0]