In computer science, a symbolic language is a language that uses characters or symbols to represent concepts, such as mathematical operations and the entities (or operands) on which these operations are performed.[1]
Modern programming languages use symbols to represent concepts and/or data and are, therefore, examples of symbolic languages.[1]
Some programming languages (such as Lisp and Mathematica) make it easy to represent higher-level abstractions as expressions in the language, enabling symbolic programming.[2][3]