Yes, that's one way to look at it. However, here's a Python symbolic differentiator I just coded now to make a more direct comparison, since Norvig's Lisp is very different from my Python in lots of distracting ways: https://github.com/darius/sketchbook/blob/master/misc/symbdi...

This symbolic differentiator could be made to not blow up, by memoizing, i.e. decorating with https://github.com/darius/sketchbook/blob/master/regex/memo.... . It'd still have the difference that it constructs an explicit formula in x, as a data structure; the autodiff code instead takes a particular x as input and calculates a value for just that x, where the value includes both an 'actual value' and a 'derivative' component. (Your library and compiler could get fancy and inline that computation at compile time back into a pair of formulas, and then yes, they ought to be exactly equivalent.)