vanilla: adj. [from the default flavor of ice cream in the
U.S.] 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 soup is the
canonical soup to get (because that is what most of them usually
order) even though it isn't the vanilla (wonton) soup.
![[prev]](../gif/left.gif){kind=small}
![[up]](../gif/up.gif){kind=small}
![[next]](../gif/right.gif){kind=small}