… which needs a terminating case, which cannot be not defined as the same recursion.
When talking informally, people often omit mentioning the base case when it's obvious or trivial.
Btw, your recursion doesn't necessarily need a terminating case.
See eg this definition of the list of Fibonacci numbers in Haskell:
fibs :: [Integer] fibs = 1 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs)
alt Hacker News
When talking informally, people often omit mentioning the base case when it's obvious or trivial.
Btw, your recursion doesn't necessarily need a terminating case.
See eg this definition of the list of Fibonacci numbers in Haskell: