The Letter A without A

Question

Your task is to display the letter "A" alone, without anything else, except any form of trailing newlines if you cannot avoid them, doing so in a program and/or snippet. Code that returns (instead of printing) is allowed.

Both the lowercase and uppercase versions of the letter "A" are acceptable (that is, unicode U+0061 or unicode U+0041. Other character encodings that aren't Unicode are allowed, but either way, the resulting output of your code must be the latin letter "A", and not any lookalikes or homoglyphs)

You must not use any of the below characters in your code, regardless of the character encoding that you pick:

• "A", whether uppercase or lowercase.

• "U", whether lowercase or uppercase.

• X, whether uppercase or lowercase.

• +

• &

• #

• 0

• 1

• 4

• 5

• 6

• 7

• 9

Cheating, loopholes, etc, are not allowed.

Since this is code-golf, the shortest solution, in bytes, that follows all the rules, is the winner.

---

Validity Checker

This Stack Snippet checks to make sure your code doesn't use the restricted characters. It might not work properly for some character encodings.

var t = prompt("Input your code.");

if (/[AaUuXx+&#0145679]/.test(t)) {
  alert("Contains a disallowed character!");
} else {
  alert("No disallowed characters");
}

This Stack Snippet that makes sure you don't have a disallowed character is also available on JSFiddle.

Leaderboard

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Answer 1

Fig, \$3\log_{256}(96)\approx\$ 2.469 bytes

[cv

Try it online!

[cv
[    # first item of
 cv  # lowercase vowels

Answer 2

K (ngn/k), 26 15 14 bytes

.`c$"c3='cD"-3

Try it online!

-11 bytes from Bubbler
-1 byte from Bubbler (this was primo)

Answer 3

Vyxal 3 g, 1 byte

n

Try it Online!

no idea why this happens but n is a builtin for lowercase alphabet and -g flag takes the minimum of the top of the stack which turns out to work on strings ???

Answer 4

Setanta 0.3.3, 64 60 35 bytes

Unfortunately, this challenge is impossible in the current version of Setanta. There is no equivalent to ord, so you have to get the a from the string representation of some object. However, this requires either go_téacs (equivalent of toString) or nasc (equivalent of join), both of which contain an a – "" + obj doesn’t work. However, before Setanta 0.4.0, go_téacs was called go_lit, making it possible to complete the challenge.

The solution gets the a from neamhní (null).

gniomh b(){}scriobh(go_lit(b())[2])

Answer 5

Zsh, 16 bytes

set {@..B};<<<$2

Try it online!

Answer 6

Brainfuck, 24 bytes

not as good as Dennis' anyones, but still posting it.

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

Answer 7

Befunge 93, 7 bytes

"C"2-,@

Pretty simple.

Answer 8

ECMAScript 6, 41 59 55 bytes

Golfed

This is the golfed version, which doesn't support the use strict pragma. If you want to allow this to be compatible with it, simply replace s=(2-2>(3-2) with var s=(2-2)>(3-2).

Version 3 of this replaced the old substring (that uses the disallowed character u) with slice, a byte-efficient version that fits these rules.

You can try this on JSFiddle or use the below Stack Snippet.

s=(2-2)>(3-2);console.log(s.toString().slice((3-2),2));

Ungolfed

This version of golfed code (version 3) supports the use strict pragma and is 79 bytes.

You can try this on JSFiddle or use the below Stack Snippet.

"use strict";
var s = (2-2) > (3-2);
console.log(s.toString().slice((3-2), 2));

Technically, this doesn't follow the rules as it uses u and a (in use and var respectively), but it was needed to support use strict.

Answer 9

Ruby, 20 Bytes

print ("c".ord-2).chr

Subtracts 2 from the unicode-code from "c".

Answer 10

WolframAlpha, 10 bytes

chr(88-23)

Answer 11

C# Interactive (REPL), 21 bytes

(3<2).ToString()[3-2]

I really wonder how much smaller it can become in C# in a REPL environment.

Answer 12

Python 2, 16 bytes

print chr(88-23)

Simpler but longer (21 bytes):

print chr(ord('c')-2)

Answer 13

Senva, 9 bytes 4 bytes

There is two ways to write this program, let's begin by the longest :

82.8--8-~

This stores 82 in the memory, substract 8, 8 again, 1, then display the memory as an ASCII char (65 is the ASCII code of A). The cell's value is 82 - 8 - 8 - 1 = 65.

The second way is a little bit pernicious :

B_-~

This converts the 'B' character to its ASCII char code, substract 1, and then display it as an ASCII char.

Answer 14

C# Interactive (REPL), 12 bytes

Lower case:

$"_{3<2}"[2]

This works by getting the third character from the string _False.

Upper case:

$"{new{}.GetType()}"[8-3]

This creates an anonymous object and gets its type, which is always of the form <>f__AnonymousType0#9. It then turns this into a string and gets the 6th character.

Answers are given as C# Interactive to compete with the other C# answer, though they can easily be converted to a printing anonymous lambda by wrapping them with:

()=>System.Console.Write(...);

This adds 27 characters to each solution.

Answer 15

3d, 7 bytes

Don't know if competing, but still, here it is.
Program:

>'b.-!;

Output:

a

Explanation:

>        Set direction of the IP
 'b      Push Unicode ordinal of character 'b'
   .     Push digit 1
    -    Push difference
     !   Print as Unicode character
      ;  End of program

Answer 16

Javascript, 32 bytes

Uppercase A:

String.fromCodePoint(33*2-(3-2))

Answer 17

MSX-BASIC, 25 bytes

?CHR$(3*3*3*2-(-3-3-3-2))

Answer 18

MIXAL - 101 bytes including tabs

Run on your MIX machine. Or assemble and run using the GNU MIX Development Kit (http://www.gnu.org/software/mdk/).

S       ENT2    2/2
        ST2     8
        ENT3    22*2-3-2-2
        ST3     P(8-3:8-3)
        ENT2    22-3
        ST2     P(8-2-2:8-2-2)
P       IN      8
        HLT
        END     S

The biggest challenge is not being able to use OUT, the only output command, or 19, the number of the teletype output device. I get around the source restrictions by creating forbidden numbers using MIX assembler arithmetic, and by using MIX's self-modifying code features.

1. Enter the number 1 into index register 2 (assembler turns 2/2 into 1)
2. Store the contents of index register 2 at memory address 8, later to be sent to the output device
3. Enter the number 37 into index register 3 using assembler arithmetic. 37 is the operation code OUT, which we need but can't use because it has a U.
4. Store the contents of index register 3 (=37) in the opcode field (5:5) of the instruction already stored at address 'P' as part of the program (in other words, change IN to OUT)
5. Enter the number 19 into index register 2. The teletype output device is no. 19.
6. Store the contents of index register 2 (=19) in the field-specification field (4:4) of the instruction at address 'P' (change 0 to 19 to specify the teletype device as output).
7. Instruction 'P': We have now rewritten this line as P OUT 8(19). So, send the contents stored at address 8 (= 1 = character code for 'A') to the teletype device for output.
8. Stop the machine.

Answer 19

JavaScript (ES6), Uppercase, 34 30 bytes

1. I started from the answers of Conor O'Brien to get this:

_=>this[`${` ${-$}`[2]}tob`]("QQ")

Since btoa("A") gives "QQ==", it's doing atob("QQ") wich gives "A".

2. Completing the answer of chronixlol :

_=>String.fromCodePoint(88-23)

Answer 20

Game Maker Language, 26 bytes

So lucky that the command is chr() instead of char()...

get_string('',chr(33*3-2))

Basically, we have to get chr(65) or chr(97) to get A or a. Also, I had to use get_string to show the output since return, show_message, show_question, etc. all contained restricted characters.

Answer 21

Microscript II, 6 bytes

2s'C-K

Basically subtracts 2 from the char code of C, then converts back to a character before printing implicitly.

In the original Microscript, it becomes this 7-byte program:

2s'C-Ph

Answer 22

Ruby REPL, 11 bytes

(88-23).chr

88 - 23 = 65. 65 is the decimal representation of ASCII A. The chr function changes the decimal representation to the character. The REPL displays the result.

Answer 23

F# Interactive, 17 bytes

string(3<2).[3-2]

This produces the following in the Output:

val it : char = 'a'

to print it to STDOUT, well, it becomes larger: 29 chars.

printf"%c"<|string(3<2).[3-2]

Answer 24

Woefully, 400 bytes

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Can probably be golfed more

Answer 25

JavaScript, Node console, 23

Shortest JavaScript I can do for a capital A.

This only works in the Node REPL console.

Object.keys(this)[2][3]

This only works in Firefox REPL (27)

Object.keys(this)[8*3][2*3]

Answer 26

Elixir, 16 bytes

IO.write [88-23]

Try it online on ElixirPlayground !

Elixir outputs the character(s) with the ASCII code specified in the list.

Using IO.puts would make it 1 byte shorter, but u is not allowed.

As expected, the interactive mode removes the need of explicitly calling IO functions for on-screen output.

---

Elixir Interactive, 7 bytes

[88-23]

Answer 27

Scala, 15 bytes

((2>3)+"")(3-2)

Explanation:

( 
  (2>3) //false
  +""   //toString
)(3-2)  //zero-indexed 1st char is 'a'

Answer 28

k, 14 bytes

*|$`byte$38-28

This returns "a"

Answer 29

GO, 22 20 bytes

print(string(88-23))

Try it online!

Answer 30

Insomnia, 2 bytes

Since any character is allowed, I used an unprintable character in the code (\u001a). Hex dump included below:

0000000: 641a                                     d.

StackExchange doesn't display control characters in the post, so click on edit to see the raw source code below and copy it to test on the online interpreter:

d