R devel - Sep 2006 - Ice cream flavor metaphor in statistical computing

Forgive me, but since it's Friday and I've been thinking about command 
line options lately, I thought I'd find out who came up with the name of 
the --vanilla argument for R. From the svn log:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
r2509 | maechler | 1998-10-10 10:52:53 -0500 (Sat, 10 Oct 1998) | 2 lines
Changed paths:
    M /trunk/src/unix/system.c

new --vanilla

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Are there any interesting anecdotes about this... Did Martin Maechler 
name it? Certainly --plain could have been used instead...

Jeff
-- 
http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/JeffreyHorner

On Fri, 2006-09-15 at 16:05 -0500, Jeffrey Horner wrote:
> Forgive me, but since it's Friday and I've been thinking about
command
> line options lately, I thought I'd find out who came up with the name
of
> the --vanilla argument for R. From the svn log:
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> r2509 | maechler | 1998-10-10 10:52:53 -0500 (Sat, 10 Oct 1998) | 2 lines
> Changed paths:
>     M /trunk/src/unix/system.c
> 
> new --vanilla
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Are there any interesting anecdotes about this... Did Martin Maechler 
> name it? Certainly --plain could have been used instead...
> 
> Jeff
Hey Jeff,

I suppose that we should be glad that Martin was not eating Ben and
Jerry's at the time or the command line might be:

  R --NewYorkSuperFudgeChunk?

;-)

This reference might be of help:

  http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=plain-vanilla

Regards,

Marc