According to wiki:
In mathematics and computer science, computer algebra, also called symbolic computation or algebraic computation is a scientific area that refers to the study and development of algorithms and software for manipulating mathematical expressions and other mathematical objects
Does symbolic computation focus on symbol manipulation and computation? Lisp program is written in the form of an AST (abstract syntax tree) with atoms as leaves. Lisp is said to be language for symbolic computing. Does it mean that in symbolic computation, it is:
According to this question, the opposite of symbolic computation is numeric computation. What's the primary difference between these two? When I work with Octave (I'm studying it), I have to work with numbers a lot and have to guess the meaning of those magic numbers many times. Is this a numerical computation focus?
Symbolic Computation is the computation with symbolic expressions.
Examples for symbolic expressions:
For the latter:
Now the task would be to generate a good plan which picks up all parcels and reaches the given goal.
In above examples symbols stand for places and for things (truck, parcel). Symbol expressions describe a situation, a plan generator will return a sequence of actions (move, pick up) - again described as symbolic expressions.
The LISt Processor (-> LISP) as symbolic computation
One of the fundamental discoveries of Lisp was then that a program is a symbolic expression and that the interpreter executing the program itself can be described by a program written as a symbolic expression. Thus the data, the Lisp program and its interpreter are symbolic expressions.