IMO (although I seemed to have difficulty getting others to agree with me) the most general definition of an API is a set of signatures where each signature is associated with a very specific meaning. In the case of Java, and many other OOP languages, the signature is the method declaration as described by Google. In BIOS the signature may be simply an interrupt number. The main requirement for the signatures is that they are uniquely identifiable by both humans and computers.

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Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay

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