Programming animations

Animations for helping programming begginers understand some mechanisms, using manim.

Installing manim

Manim may be distributed for your system, but I suggest installing in a virtualenv using the requirements.txt file:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

With a virtualenv, if you open a new terminal and want to use this project in it, you need to run source venv/bin/activate again.

With Nix

Alternatively, if using nix, you can simply run nix-shell in this repository. I suggest using direnv to automatically load the environment:

echo "use_nix" > .direnvrc
direnv allow

Building the animations

After installing manim, you can run manim [options] ocaml.py to render the animations. For example, manim -p ocaml.py will render and play your choosen animation, manim ocaml.py will only render it.

Current animations

• manim ocaml.py SquareOfPred: visualize a simple function call evaluation with emphasis on the "context" of the evaluation (current name-value associations).
• manim ocaml.py Fact: visualize a call to a recursive factorial implementation to illustrate how different calls have different contexts that may be reused when going back up the call stack.