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)
Nearby terms:
valve « vampire tap « VAN « vanilla » vanity
domain » vannevar » Vannevar Bush
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