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vanilla


vanilla: [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.