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.

