[brudgers]

This is how Wolfram described SMP which was the precursor to Mathmatica:

SMP is intended to be close to conventional mathematics. The fundamental operations of mathematics are included among the 100 or so primitives of the language, together with about 250 mathematical functions. Direct use of these primitives alone suffices in some simple calculations, such as those in Figure 1. However, as in mathematics itself, higher level constructs and operations must be defined to cover the immense variety of methods and calculations encountered in practice. SMP was designed at a fundamental level to make use of the notations and mechanisms developed in mathematics for such definitions.

http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/articles/computin...