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}.
{(ftp://cs.arizona.edu/snobol4/vanilla.arc)}
(1992-02-05)