The DoD military standard number assigned to the Ada programming language was MIL-STD-1815.
The number was chosen deliberately: Ada Lovelace was born in 1815. The language itself was developed for the United States Department of Defense by a team led by French computer scientist Jean Ichbiah, after the department sought to reduce the large number of programming languages used in defense systems.
The Ada reference manual was approved on 10 December 1980, Lovelace’s birthday, and the first standard was designated MIL-STD-1815. A revised version published in 1983 was MIL-STD-1815A. The language later became an international standard, ISO 8652, and subsequent revisions are commonly known as Ada 95, Ada 2005, Ada 2012, and Ada 2022.
The number is therefore not a random military identifier and does not refer to the year the language was designed. It commemorates Lovelace’s birth year, while the language’s name commemorates her contribution to the history of computing.