Mathematica: what is symbolic programming?

Question

I am a big fan of Stephen Wolfram, but he is definitely one not shy of tooting his own horn. In many references, he extols Mathematica as a different symbolic programming p

Answer 1

As others here already mentioned, Mathematica does a lot of term rewriting. Maybe Haskell isn't the best comparison though, but Pure is a nice functional term-rewriting language (that should feel familiar to people with a Haskell background). Maybe reading their Wiki page on term rewriting will clear up a few things for you:

http://code.google.com/p/pure-lang/wiki/Rewriting