Lisp was developed largely for Symbolic Computing. See the famous McCarthy paper. Early on it was detected that Lisp execution can be seen as Symbolic Computing

Lisp was developed largely for Symbolic Computing. See the famous McCarthy paper. Early on it was detected that Lisp execution can be seen as Symbolic Computing itself - see the Lisp interpreter executing symbolic expressions and the famous definition of Lisp evaluation in Lisp itself. Lisp then had the first self-hosted compiler, the first integrated macro system and the first integrated structure editors in the early 60s. That was Lisp back then. Lisp then early on was used in a bunch of symbolic computing domains: theorem provers, computer algebra, natural language processing, planning, rule-based languages, programming language implementation (languages like ML or Scheme were implemented first in Lisp). In the Lisp sense Python does not have a REPL, since it does not implement READ, EVAl and PRINT over symbolic data, like Lisp does.