: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.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
o-op: /noh'op/ alt. NOP /nop/ [no operation] n. 1. (also v.)
A machine instruction that does nothing (sometimes used in
assembler-level programming as filler for data or patch areas, or
to overwrite code to be removed in binaries)....
