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

Pxem, 6 bytes: filename.

First two characters are as escaped notation.

\303\003.$.p

Try it online!

Answer 2

Lean Mean Bean Machine, 11 9 bytes

O
"
b
)
!

Try it online!

O Spawn a marble,
"b set it to b,
) decrement it,
! print it.

I don't recall when this was changed, but LMBM now automatically destroys a marble if it falls out of bounds, so the ; is no longer needed

Answer 3

Python 3, 33 bytes

print(chr(223-33-33-33-33--3--3))

Try it online!

Answer 4

StupidStackLanguage, 9 bytes

rvvddqmif

Try it online!

Explanation

r         # push length of stack (0)
 vvdd     # push 8 to stack
     qm   # square
       i  # increment
        f # print as ASCII

Answer 5

Flobnar, 8 bytes

!g<
@:*,

Try it online!

Uses the initial value 0 of : (the current argument), and the fact that 33 ('!') * 33 % 256 == 65 == 'A'. Other candidates include:

95 ('_') * 95 % 256 == 65 == 'A'
49 ('1') * 49 % 256 == 97 == 'a'
79 ('O') * 79 % 256 == 97 == 'a'

but all of these are either not useful or simply banned. Particularly it is too bad that 7 is also banned.

@        Start here, facing west
,        Evaluate and print mod 256 as char (using -w flag):
*          Multiply its north and south (both of which point to <)
<          Evaluate to left
g          Take north as x and south as y, and get the code value at (x,y)
:          Both x and y evaluate to 0
         (0,0) is '!' == 33, so (33 * 33 = 1089) % 256 = 65 = 'A' is printed

Answer 6

Thunno, \$ 5 \log_{256}(96) \approx \$ 4.12 bytes

Z23-C

Attempt This Online!

Explanation

Z23-C  # No inputs
Z2     # Push 100
  3    # Push 3
   -   # Subtract to get 97
    C  # Get the character at that codepoint ('a')
       # Implicit output

Thunno, \$ 6 \log_{256}(96) \approx \$ 4.94 bytes

Z3Z2/h

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Explanation

Z3Z2/h  # No inputs
Z3      # Push 1000
  Z2    # Push 100
    /   # Divide to get 10
     h  # Convert to hexadecimal to get 'a'
        # Implicit output

Thunno, \$ 7 \log_{256}(96) \approx \$ 5.76 bytes

88 23-C

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Explanation

88 23-C  # No inputs
88       # Push 88
   23    # Push 23
     -   # Subtract to get 65
      C  # Get the character at that codepoint ('A')
         # Implicit output

Answer 7

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

[cB

Try it online!

Didn't see that there was another Fig answer, but here's a different version.

[cB
 cB # "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
[   # First char of the above

Answer 8

GolfScript, 7 bytes

'B'{(}%

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Answer 9

Python 3, 17 Bytes

print(chr(88-23))

$$88-23=65$$

Answer 10

C89, 22 bytes

f(){printf("%c",833);}

Explanation

$ man 3 printf || info '(libc)Other Output Conversions'

"%c ... the int argument is [first] converted to an unsigned char,"

1. 'A' == 65
2. \$833 \equiv 65\ (\textrm{mod}\ 256)\$

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Answer 11

Deadfish~, 10 bytes

iisiiiisic

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Answer 12

JavaScript (Node.js), 23 bytes

_=>`${[].entries()}`[8]

Try it online!

This is my best attempt at getting capital A.

Answer 13

R, 37 36 bytes

write(el(strsplit(c(F,""),""))[2],2)

Attempt This Online!

This outputs a capital \$A\$.

F is a short constant for FALSE, here it is converted to a string, splitted into characters and the 2nd letter is output.

R, 37 36 bytes

write(el(strsplit(c(F/F,""),"N")),2)

Attempt This Online! This outputs a lowercase \$a\$.

The expession F/F (a replacement for 0/0) produces NaN ("not a number"), which is converted to a string, both "N"'s are removed and the rest is output.

Answer 14

Rattle, 9 bytes

=8--s-$c,

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This might not be the shortest possible answer in Rattle... Can anyone beat this?

Explanation

=8              set top of stack to 8
  --            subtract 2
    s           save the result (6) to memory
     -          subtract 1
      $         swap the result with the value in memory (swap 5 and 6)
       c        concatenate these values to get 65
        ,       output ASCII character 65 ('A')

Answer 15

Messenger, 48 bytes

v >v   >v
3>* >>*S8 >v
>S >S  >>-S8
 >^ >^    >-

Messenger is my first (completed) esolang. It works in 2D, and it uses messages for storage, rather than variables or stacks. This makes it tough to code in, since timing and placing have to be managed so that the code doesn't break (or worse, throw an error).

A Python 3.8+ interpreter which works from the command line can be found here. To use it in Try It Online, IDLE, etc., remove the ## WHILE RUNNING ## section of the code.

Explanation

Unused characters in each step have been replaced with a dot.

v
3

Create a message going down, and set its contents to 3.

·>*
>S
 >^

Split the message into two identical copies, then put them into the * (multiply) function. This creates a new message carrying a 9.

>v
· >>*
 >S
· >^

Split it again, and multiply it by itself again. This creates another message carrying an 81.

>v
S8
>>-

Subtract 8 from 81, giving 73.

>v
S8
>-

Subtract 8 from 73, giving 65.

v
·
-

The message carrying a 65 reaches the bottom edge, where it gets printed as a Unicode codepoint (in this case, a capital A).

Reflection

This is probably close to optimal, since, due to the nature of 2D programs like this, 48 bytes doesn't give you a lot of room. This effect is even further exacerbated by the fact that making numbers in Messenger requires you to smash three or four digits together with arithmetic operations.

Answer 16

Uiua, 4 bytes

-2@C

Try it here!

Subtracts 2 codepoints from the capital letter C.

Answer 17

AWK, 21 bytes

END{printf"%c",88-23}

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Answer 18

iogii, 3 bytes

'B(

run it here!!

Decrements the character B to get A.

Answer 19

Python, 32 bytes

print(chr(ord("@")-(-ord("pretend this is SOH"))))

The character in the second ord there is SOH. SOH, which is ASCII 1, is negated and subtracted from @, which is ASCII 64, to make ASCII 65, which is A.