Print the alphabet without using each vowel

Question

Inspiration: in 1939, a man named Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel called Gadsby without using the letter 'e'.

Your task is to write a set of (up to 5) programs in any language (which has a text-based syntax*) to output all 26 letters of the alphabet in order. However for each vowel aeiou, at least one of the programs must not include any occurrence of the vowel.

So there must be

• a program that does not use 'a' or 'A' anywhere in the syntax of the program.
• a program that does not use 'e' or 'E' anywhere in the syntax of the program.
• a program that does not use 'i'  or 'I' anywhere in the syntax of the program.
• a program that does not use 'o' or 'O' anywhere in the syntax of the program.
• a program that does not use 'u' or 'U' anywhere in the syntax of the program.

All of them must output abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.

The winner shall be the solution where the length of all programs is the shortest.

_{* since the constraint wouldn't be much of a challenge in Piet or Whitespace}

Answer 1

Golfscript - 8 chars

123,97>+

Answer 2

Brainfuck, 38 chars

++++++[->++++<]>[->+>++++<<]>++[->+.<]

There are, of course, no vowels (or any other letters) in brainfuck syntax.

Answer 3

PHP, 31 Bytes

No a,e,i,o,u:

<?=~žœ›š™˜—–•”“’‘ŽŒ‹Š‰ˆ‡†…;

The binary string after the tilde has the following hex representation:

\x9e\x9d\x9c\x9b\x9a\x99\x98\x97\x96\x95\x94\x93\x92\x91\x90\x8f\x8e\x8d\x8c\x8b\x8a\x89\x88\x87\x86\x85

---

Since there's a language scoreboard, I may as well submit this one as well:

Ruby (v1.8) 18 bytes

$><<[*97.chr..'z']

Answer 4

Pyth, 1 Character

G

Pyth predefines certain variables. G is predefined as the lowercase alphabet. Pyth also implicitly prints each line with a reasonable return value.

Answer 5

Ruby (24 22)

Edit: parentheses can be omitted, 2 chars less:

$><<'%c'*26%[*97..122]

24 chars in Ruby:

$><<('%c'*26)%[*97..122]

How it works

$> is an alias for $stdout or STDOUT. You can write to it using the << operator. The term '%c'*26 repeats the string '%c' 26 times. The % operator is defined on String as an alias to sprintf, so str % val is equivalent to writing sprintf(str,val). The format character %c is used to transform a char value to a char. These values come from [*97..122] which creates an array containing the values from 97 to 122. Et voilá!

Answer 6

JavaScript (100)

No 'aeou':

this['\x61l\x65rt']('\x61bcd\x65fghijklmn\x6fpqrst\x75vwxyz')

No 'i':

alert('abcdefgh\x69jklmnopqrstuvwxyz')

Answer 7

K,9

_26#.Q.b6

K,10

"c"$97+!26

K,14

.:".Q.","c"$97

Answer 8

R, 17 + 19 = 36 characters

no ae (17):

intToUtf8(97:122)

no iou (19):

cat(letters,sep="")

Answer 9

J, 26 23 17 16 characters

After an hour or so rummaging around in J's underwear drawer I've finally found a way to eliminate the a. and u: verbs.

2(3!:4)96+#\26$1

Previously:

a.{~96++/\26$1
u:97+i.26

with thanks to randomra for the #\ trick.

Answer 10

C, 90 88 84 characters

Compile using gcc -nostartfiles

b;_exit(){for(;b<26;)printf("%c",b+++97);}    // 42 chars, works for a, u
b;_start(){putchar(b+++97)>121?:_start();}    // 42 chars, works for e, i, o

Answer 11

Bash (38)

No vowels at all.

/*/*/*ntf "/*/?ch? {\x61..z}"|/*/b?sh

Answer 12

Golfscript, 10 characters

26,{97+}%+

Answer 13

BASH: 40 characters

• No aeiou used.
• No wildcard used.

`tr c-y '\141-w'<<<'rtkpvh %s c'` {b..z}

Answer 14

Ruby, 20 chars

$><<[*97.chr..?z]*''

• 97.chr is an elaborate way of saying 'a'
• .. specifies a Range
• ?z is a shorter way of saying "z"
• the [*range] causes the range to splat al it's values in an array
• *'' is the same as join(''); it glues all array values together.
• $><< Perlicism: print to stdout.

Answer 15

dc: 18 17 characters

97[dP1+dBD>m]dsmx

And there died a brave character.

Answer 16

Powershell, 75 62 characters

Edit: Used -f (String.Format) and array indexing to significantly reduce the code length.

'{0}bcd{1}fgh{2}jklmn{3}pqrst{4}vwxyz'-f"$(1|gm)"[8,10,0,5,31]

How it works

gm is an alias for get-members, so 1|gm returns members of the value 1, which is of the System.Int32 type:

PS C:\> 1|gm
   TypeName: System.Int32
Name        MemberType Definition
----        ---------- ----------
CompareTo   Method     int CompareTo(System.Object value), int CompareTo(int value)
Equals      Method     bool Equals(System.Object obj), bool Equals(int obj)
GetHashCode Method     int GetHashCode()
...

"$(1|gm)" returns a string representation of the above list, which happens to contain all the vowels we need to complete the alphabet: "int CompareTo(System.Object value)..."

Answer 17

Haskell, 12

['\97'..'z']

Or is this cheating? :)

Answer 18

MATLAB, 12+20=32 characters

No eiou (12):

char(97:122)

No aeou (20)

fprintf('%s',97:122)

Answer 19

In Perl,

it's also possible without any vowels

but much harder than in Ruby etc. This uses a total of 101 chars but doesn't require cmd line (perl -e) invocation.

`\160\145\162\154\40\55\145\40\42\160\162\151\156\164\40\123\124\104\105\122\122\40\141\56\56\172\42`

=> Result: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

In contrast to the 'similar looking' PHP Solution, this is a real program. The program decoded reads:

perl -e "print STDERR a..z"

After encoding to octal values, another perl interpreter is called during run by the `` (backticks). The backticks would consume the output, therefore it's printed to STDERR.

The encoding is done by sprintf:

my $s = q{perl -e "print STDERR a..z"};
my $cmd = eval(
       '"' . join('', map sprintf("\\%o",ord $_), split //, $s) . '"'
       );

and the eval'd encoding is the program posted (within backticks):

"\160\145\162\154\40\55\145\40\42\160\162"
"\151\156\164\40\123\124\104\105\122\122"
"\40\141\56\56\172\42"

Regards

rbo

Answer 20

Perl 5, 22 characters

(1) only contains a and e, 10 chars (requires 5.10+, run from the command line):

-Esay+a..z

(2) only contains 'i', 12 chars:

print v97..z

If not allowed to run from the command line, then you need to use use 5.01;say a..z for the first one, at a cost of 7 characters and one more vowel, but it still has no 'i', so it results in a valid entry at 29 total characters.

Answer 21

APL (Dyalog) (11 13)

You might need an APL font. This is supposed to be Unicode but there's no preview...

Only U (and perhaps ⍳ if counting Greek vowels):

⎕UCS 96+⍳26

(That's: [quad]UCS 96+[iota]26)

Only A:

⎕A

Answer 22

Python 2, 83

No a, i, o or u; 47:

x=97;s='';exec"s+=chr(x);x+=1;"*26+"pr\x69nt s"

No e; 36:

print"abcd\x65fghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"

Answer 23

Ruby, 22

$><<[*?`..?{][1,26]*''

No letters whatsoever :)

Answer 24

Python 2, 175 characters

Note: prints to output unlike earlier python answer.

Uses 'e', but no a,i,o,u - 63 61 59 65 (fix mistaken i move to lowercase) 115 chars (get rid of spaces).

exec('fr%cm sys %cmp%crt*\nf%cr x %cn r%cnge(97,123):std%c%ct.wr%cte(chr(x)),'%(111,105,111,111,105,97,111,117,105))

(Originally, it used print with a comma that inserted a space; also printed upper case letters. Now saw stringent requirements for 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz' as output; so adding import statement).

Doesn't use 'e' (uses a,i,o,u; could trivially get rid of a,u for small extension) - 61 60 chars

import string
print string.__dict__['low%crcas%c'%(101,101)]

Answer 25

JavaScript (154)

(1) Only contains i (99 chars):

t=this;s=-t+t+t.b;z=s[1]+'bcd'+s[7]+'fghijklmn'+s[4]+'pqrst'+s[21]+'vwxyz';t[s[1]+'l'+s[7]+'rt'](z)

(2) Only contains aeou (55 chars):

t=0;s=''+t.b;alert('abcdefgh'+s[5]+'jklmnopqrstuvwxyz')

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/SvN5n/

Answer 26

Python 159 117

As mentioned in the other python post the hardest part is dealing with the fact that the only way to output is to use print or sys.stdout.write, both of which contain i. Have to do it with 2 programs (which are freestanding and don't use the python interactive shell to create the output):

This one only uses i for 55 chars:

print"%cbcd%cfghijklmn%cpqrst%cvwxyz"%(97,101,111,117)

This one avoids using i for 104 chars:

eval("sys.stdout.wr%cte"%105,{'sys':eval("__%cmport__('sys')"%105)})("%c"*26%tuple(range(97,123))+"\n")

EDIT: Massive breakthrough!!! I was thinking that use of eval (or even exec) was a bit of a cheat and not truly in the spirit of the competition. Anyway, trawling through the builtins I found a way to get hold of the print function without using i. So here is the avoid-i (and o) program for 68 chars:

vars(vars().values()[0])['pr%cnt'%105]("%c"*26%tuple(range(97,123)))

But because that also avoids o, this can be paired with one that only avoids a, e, u for 49 chars:

print"%cbcd%cfghijklmnopqrst%cvwxyz"%(97,101,117)

Answer 27

Ruby 196 164 44 47

$><<"\x61bcd\x65fgh\x69jklmn\x6Fpqrst\x75vwxyz"

Answer 28

VBA: 76 brute force, 116 without 'cheating' (98 if newlines are acceptable in the output)

Standard Functions

Thanks to VBA's verbosity, I don't believe this can be done without 'E' or 'U' in a standard code module...

• "E nd"
• "F u nction"
• "S u b"

Immediate Functions

Running with mellamokb's assumption, here's without the function declaration (leaving out SUB and FUNCTION) (116 chars, 98 if newlines are acceptable in output):

The below uses neither 'e' nor 'a' (43 chars, formatted to run in the immediate window):

b=65:Do:z=z+Chr(b):b=b+1:Loop Until b=91:?z

The below uses neither 'i' nor 'a' nor 'u' (33 chars, formatted to run in the immediate window):

For b=65 To 90:z=z+Chr(b):Next:?z

The below uses neither 'a' nor 'o' nor 'u' (40 chars, formatted to run in the immediate window):

b=65:While b<91:z=z+Chr(b):b=b+1:Wend:?z

---

If newline characters are allowed in the output, then the above examples can be shorter:

(37 chars)

b=65:Do:?Chr(b):b=b+1:Loop Until b=91

(27 chars)

For b=65 To 90:?Chr(b):Next

(34 chars)

b=65:While b<91:?Chr(b):b=b+1:Wend

---

Brute Force

Running with w0lf's Ruby answer

(76 chars, formatted to run in the immediate window):

?Chr(65)&"BCD"&Chr(69)&"FGH"&Chr(73)&"JKLMN"&Chr(79)&"PQRST"&Chr(85)&"VWXYZ"

Answer 29

Rebmu: 15 characters

Ctc'`L26[pn++C]

Reading Rebmu always requires a bit of unmushing to start with:

c: tc '` l 26 [pn ++ c]

Then it helps to expand the abbreviations:

c: to-char-mu '`
loop 26 [
    prin ++ c
]

It would be more obvious using a character literal for the predecessor of lowercase a:

c: #"`"
loop 26 [
    prin ++ c
]

But that doesn't "mush", so converting a word literal to a character passes for the same purpose. What I like about it, as with most Rebmu, is that it has the spirit of a sensible program despite the compression. (The Golfscript answer is shorter but doesn't map to the way a programmer would usually think when coding.)

Answer 30

<>< (Fish) - 22 characters

Because <>< uses the 'o' to print a character, this challenge seems impossible to do. Luckily, fish can change its own code in runtime. This allowed me to add the print instruction to the code.

This code uses none of the vowels:

'`78'+11pv
:X:'z'=?;>1+

You can run the code here