vanilla

1. (Default flavour of ice cream in the US) Ordinary

flavour, standard. When used of food, very often does not

mean that the food is flavoured 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 PDP 11/34." Also used to orthogonalise 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

to a chinese restaurant, 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.

[Jargon File]

(1994-11-04)

2. Snobol4 by Catspaw, Inc. for MS-DOS.

.

(1992-02-05)