vanilla
[from the default flavor of ice cream in the U.S.] adj.
Ordinary flavor, standard. When used of food, very often does
not mean that the food is flavored with vanilla extract! For
example, `vanilla wonton soup' means ordinary wonton soup, as
opposed to hot-and-sour wonton soup. Applied to hardware and
software, as in "Vanilla Version 7 UNIX can't run on a
vanilla 11/34." Also used to orthogonalize chip nomenclature; for
instance, a 74V00 means what TI calls a 7400, as distinct from
a 74LS00, etc. This word differs from canonical in that the
latter means `default', whereas vanilla simply means `ordinary'.
For example, when hackers go on a great-wall, hot-and-sour
wonton soup is the canonical wonton soup to get (because that
is what most of them usually order) even though it isn't the
vanilla wonton soup.
