Waldo: /wol'doh/ [From Robert A. Heinlein's Story "Waldo"] 1.

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:waldo: /wol'doh/ [From Robert A. Heinlein's story "Waldo"]
1. A mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human
limb. When these were developed for the nuclear industry in the
mid-1940s they were named after the invention described by Heinlein
in the story, which he wrote in 1942. Now known by the more
generic term `telefactoring', this technology is of intense
interest to NASA for tasks like space station maintenance. 2. At
Harvard (particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used
instead of {foobar} as a metasyntactic variable and general
nonsense word. See {foo}, {bar}, {foobar}, {quux}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary

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