[wazari972]

(as a French speaker,) I'm not sure to agree with the comments that associate "mise en abyme" with recursivity.

For me, examples of mise en abyme is a film shot in a movie, or story read from a book in a book. In CS, it means a function called from another function ... which is not necessarily recursivity :)

[pierrec]

That was also my first thought, but after consideration, there's more to "mise en abyme" than simply placing a story within another.

I think in France everyone learns this term at least in high school, specifically applied to literature, and the way I was taught is that something in the inner story reflects something in the outer story. So for example, you'd talk about the "mise en abyme" of a specific relationship between two characters. This brings it a bit closer to self-similar recursion, but I agree it's still quite different and generally not about fully self-referential concepts (IMO Wikipedia goes a bit over the top in that regard).

[filmor]

"recursion" is calling a function from itself. You usually want this to terminate at some point, though, and thus will have some kind of branching, so it's not "en abyme".