alt Hacker NewsFortran is about numerical programming without having to deal with explicit addresses. Symbolic programming is something like lisp.
Llms do not manipulate symbols according to rules, they predict tokens, or arbitrary glyphs in human parlance, based on statistical rules.
Fortran internally transforms expressions to assembly using symbolic computation. a+0->a, a+b->b+a.
LLMs are very much supported by symbolic computation. These "arbitrary glyphs" are computed by symbolic computation. The output of LLMs is constrained by program language grammar in code generation tasks. LLMs are often run with beam search, which is symbolic computation.