[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.
