A foreign function interface (FFI) is a mechanism by which a program written in one programming language can call routines or make use of services written in another. The term comes from the specification for Common Lisp, which explicitly refers to the language features for inter-language calls as such; the term is also used officially by the Haskell and Python programming languages. Other languages use other terminology: the Ada programming language talks about "language bindings", while Java refers to its FFI as the JNI (Java Native Interface) or JNA (Java Native Access). Foreign function interface has become generic terminology for mechanisms which provide such services.