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.