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

Bash, 14 13 bytes

tr PQ @-B<<<Q

Output:

A

Answer 2

Bash, 15

• 3-8 bytes saved thanks to @DPD-.

echo 
{Y..b..8}

There is a CR character immediately preceding the {. This is probably not rendered meaningfully by the browser.

In real terms, this outputs "CRYSPACECRa". The CR (carriage return) moves the cursor back to the beginning of the line, and so the a overwrites the y.

Try it online!

This doesn't render correctly in TIO, so there is an additional pipe to col -b to make the cursor movements absolute.

To enter this at the terminal:

• type echoSPACE
• type CTRL-V CTRL-M
• type {Y..b..8}

Answer 3

Deadfish~, 8 bytes

iiisdsic

The only difference from regular Deadfish is that it uses c, which outputs the accumulator as a character instead of an integer.

Explanation

• increment 3 times (3)
• square (9)
• decrement (8)
• square (64)
• increment (65)
• Output as a character ("A")

Answer 4

PHP, 14 bytes

<?=chr(88-23);

88 - 23 = 65, the ASCII value of A. 8, 2, and 3 are the only legal digits to use, and - is allowed.

Answer 5

VBA, 12 bytes

?Chr(88-23);

in the VBA Immediate window.

Answer 6

Dyalog APL, 12 bytes

⊃⎕DR/88-8 23

Equivalent to 80 ⎕DR 65

Answer 7

Labyrinth, 6 5 bytes

833.@

Explanation

833     # push 833 to stack
    .   # print modulo 256 as byte
     @  # exit

Try it online

Saved 1 byte thanks to Martin Ender.

Answer 8

dc, 4 bytes

833P

UCHAR_MAX overflow rolls through the table six three times before landing at 65.

Answer 9

Mathematica, 16 bytes

First@WordList[]

WordList[] gives a list of common English words. First takes the first element of this list, which is "a".

Answer 10

Powershell v5, 13 12 11 bytes

"$(!2)"[$?]

Thanks to krontogiannis for saving me a byte.

Old 12 byte solution.

"$(!$?)"[$?]

Explanation:

"$(!$?)"[$?]
    $?        #returns the status of the last command, in this case, the call to this PS file
   !          #false operator
 $(   )       #runs the code in between () even while its in between ""
"      "      #converts to string
        [$?]  #returns index 1 (true) of the preceding string (1 is forbidden)

I don't have any earlier versions easily available to test on right now, but this should work back to v2 at least.

Answer 11

Sesos, 3 bytes

The code contains two unprintable characters, so here is a hexdump:

0000000: a85a0d                                            .Z.

Try it online! (Note that this uses the assembly code, which TIO converts to the binary above as an intermediate step. The binary is shown as a debug message.)

It is generated from this assembly program:

add 65
put

Answer 12

Java 9 jshell, 18 bytes

printf("%c",'C'-2)

jshell is a Java REPL that comes with Java 9.

Answer 13

Brachylog, 7 bytes

@P:33mw

Try it online!

Explanation

@P is the following string:

 !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~

(the first character is a space)

And its 33rd element is the required letter A.

@P:33mw
@P        generate the string above
  :33     append the number 33, yielding ["...",33]
     m    pass the array as Input of m, and the
          required character becomes the Output
      w   recycles the right argument of the previous
          predicate as the left argument, and then
          prints to STDOUT

Answer 14

Bash, 19 17 bytes

Prints lower-case a:

printf \\$[282/2]

(Thanks to Dennis for reminding me of the deprecated syntax)

Answer 15

dc, 8 7 bytes

-1B thanks to Dennis

88 23-P

Pushes 88, pushes 23, subtracts, leaving 65. Print top of stack (65) as an ASCII string, sans trailing newline.

Edit:

These are a few of the other ways I came up with. It basically became a game of "generate the numbers 65 and 97 using only [238B-F] and without addition". Ironically, I find the longest ones most interesting.

_Fdd/r-oC 2-n  # involves changing the base
2_2/8d*3*2/-P
Idd2/2/-2*on   # also changes base
2d8r^r_2/-P
8d*2_2/-P
B 3d**2-P
33 3*2-P

Answer 16

Retina, 8 bytes

M`
T`O`L

Try it online!

Explanation

M`

This counts the number of matches of the empty regex in the empty input, so it produces a 1.

T`O`L

This is a transliteration which substitutes characters from the first set with corresponding characters from the second set. However, O and L are shorthands which expand to the odd digits and the upper case alphabet, respectively, so this replaces the 1 with A.

Answer 17

Commodore 64 BASIC, 6 bytes

2?"♠"

There's a non-printing character after the first quotation mark, with byte value 14.

How this works: The Commodore 64 has two character sets: "shifted mode" (which contains the full upper- and lower-case alphabet, and the startup "unshifted mode", which contains the upper-case alphabet and a selection of symbols. The "spade" symbol in unshifted mode has the same byte value as uppercase "A" in shifted mode, so if you switch modes before printing out a "♠", you get the letter "A" instead.

The question now becomes: what's the most efficient way of switching modes? The "approved" method is POKE 53272,23, but that's rather long for code golf. There's a control character (byte value 14) that switches to shifted mode, but you can't type it in directly, and ?CHR$(14) is still rather long. Further, both of these contain disallowed characters, and working around that would expand them quite a bit.

You can cut it down to a single byte, though, by combining it with the code to print out the "A". The Commodore has no memory protection, so after typing in a proxy program (I used 2?"Q♠"), you can modify the in-memory representation to replace the "Q" with byte value 14. For a freshly-started C64, POKE 2055,14 will do the job.

Answer 18

Whitespace, 15 bytes

It's easy to avoid characters with a language that doesn't use any of them!

Try it online!

.               
.   
.  

The .'s are unneccessary, and are just to make the codeblock work.

For a more readable format: s = space, t = tab, newline placement matters

ssstssssst
t
ss

First line pushes (ss) positive (s) 65 (tssssst, binary 1000001) onto the stack)

Second and third lines print top of stack as char.

Answer 19

R 3.2.2, 34 32 bytes

This is a tricky challenge in R, since the only function that will print without quotes and junk is cat, which contains an "a". We have to get it by indirect means. In a fresh R installation with no extra packages, the base package (in which cat resides) is the eighth in the search list (luckily 8 isn't prohibited!)

cat is the 297th thing in the base package, but 9 and 7 are prohibited. I think 322-23-2 is the most efficient way to calculate 297, but I may be wrong!

(Edit: I was wrong. Thanks to Albert Masclans for pointing out that 33*3*3 is more efficient. I also added the R version number since later versions of R will probably introduce more things into the base package.)

"a" is held in the first element of letters (alternatively, use LETTERS if you want "A") but since 1 is prohibited, we use 3-2 to get it.

    get(ls(8)[33*3*3])(letters[3-2])

Answer 20

Vim, 19 bytes (not competing)

:redi@"|Ni!<CR>pJd3w~D

Do you demand a shrubbery?

Answer 21

Octave, 13 11 8 bytes

Didn't expect to golf this answer down, but wohoo, a bug(?) in Octave made it possible to save two bytes! :) Converting this to a "full program", instead of a function saves an additional three bytes, leaving us with 8 bytes:

['',833]

['',833] concatenates the empty string with the number 883. The ASCII code for A is 65, so 883 might seem a bit odd. I think this must be a bug, but what Octave does when concatenating an empty string and a number is that it takes the number modulus 256. mod(883, 256) == 65 which just so happens to be the ASCII code for A.

Octave does not do this when using the "proper" method, char(883), in which case we will get:

warning: range error for conversion to character value

Answer 22

R, 11 bytes

el(LETTERS)

el(LETTERS) is equivalent to LETTERS[[1]].

Try it online!

Answer 23

Whispers v2, 190^* 108 bytes

> e
> 8
>> 2²
> e
> e
> e
> e
>> ≻3
> e
> e
> e
> e
> e
> e
> e
> e
> e
> e
> e
> e
> e
>> '8
>> Error 22

Try it online!

Outputs A to STDERR, which is an accepted method of output

_{*82 bytes saved by golfing formula from \$65 = (3 - (-2)) - (-2 \times 3) \times (8 - (-2))\$ to \$65 = 8^2+1\$}

How it works

Whispers is different to most languages, in that numbers (0123456789) don't always represent their numerical values. A Whispers program is a series of lines, each of which matches (at least) one of a series of regexes. All the regexes require a line to begin with either > or >> (note the space).

Lines that begin with > are nilad lines, and return a constant value each time. on these lines, digits do represent their respective numerical values. For example, line 2 (> 8) returns the integer \$8\$.

However, lines beginning with >> treat numbers as line references, rather than numerical values. This means that >> 2² doesn't actually return \$2^2 = 4\$. Rather, it retrieves the value on line 2 and returns its square. Execution works by starting on the last line, and getting values passed along through other lines, similar to a game of Chinese Whispers (hence the name).

Now, as we can't use any of 0145679, we have to construct either \$65\$ or \$97\$ using only \$2\$, \$3\$ and \$8\$. Furthermore, we can't refer to any lines aside from 2, 3, 8, 22, 23, etc. which is why we have so many lines that are just > e. These are all unexecuted, and just serve to pad the important lines to line numbers that we can use.

We use the formula \$65 = 8^2 + 1\$ in order to build \$65\$ (the char code of A). Luckily, Whispers has an increment command (≻), so we don't have to deal with addition or calculating the number \$1\$. So, we start execution on the last line:

>> Error 22

This calls line 22, outputs its value to STDERR, then exits. Line 22, directly above, is

>> '8

' is the to character command, equivalent to Python's chr builtin, so here, we take the value on line 8 and convert it to a Unicode character. Now, we can see lines 2, 3 and 8, in order:

> 8
>> 2²
>> ≻3

Kind of counter intuitively, these lines are executed in reverse order: first line 8 increments the value on line 3, then line 3 squares the value on line 2 i.e. \$8\$. Ultimately, line 8 returns \$8^2 + 1 = 65\$ which is then cast to character and outputted to STDERR.

Answer 24

Groovy, 9 bytes

f={--'B'}

Try it online!

Makes use of the decrement operator overloading on Strings, per CharSequence.previous().

Previous solution

I missed the fact that a return value was an acceptable alternative to printing the result.

Groovy, 12 bytes

print(--'B')

Answer 25

Jolf, 3 bytes

Fpl

Try it here!

First (F) of the lowercase alphabet (pl).

---

Are you tired of verifying your code manually? Use this!

---

Another one for three bytes:

~TS

This is the hexadecimal char code of a newline (0x0A)

Answer 26

Snowman, 14 bytes

{8vn2nPNiNwRsp

Explanation

{               # activate bdg
 8              # set b to 8
  vn            # no-op
    2           # set d to 2
     nP         # set b to 8^2=64
       NiN      # set b to b+1 = 65
          wR    # wrap in array
            sp  # print

Try it online

Answer 27

Dyalog APL, 15 bytes

{⍵::2⌷⊃⎕DM⋄⍺}⍴⍬

The straightforward options are all banned: both ⎕AV (APL character set vector) and ⎕UCS (Unicode conversion) contain banned characters.

It gives one uppercase A:

      {⍵::2⌷⊃⎕DM⋄⍺}⍴⍬
A

Explanation:

• {...}⍴⍬: pass 0 (length of empty vector) into the function
• ⍵::: trap the error with code ⍵, which will be 0. A trap on 0 means to trap all errors.
• 2⌷⊃⎕DM: the 2nd character of the first line of the error message
• ⋄⍺: try to return the value of the left argument. There isn't one, so this will raise a VALUE ERROR, which the A is then extracted from.

Answer 28

Ruby, 17 bytes

print (88-23).chr

Thanks to Dennis for the expression, a big improvement over 23*8/2-3*8-3, my first idea.

Answer 29

Lua, 36 bytes

_,_,y=type{}:find(".(.)")io.write(y)

Explanation:

• type{} is equivalent to type({}) and returns the string "table" with the desired 'a'.
• string.find's very infrequently-used 3rd return value is the first capture from the pattern. Most of the other ways that could be used to chop up a string are forbidden by the alphabet restrcitions.

Comments:

Alternatively, print for -3 bytes if not required to suppress the trailing newline.

I really wanted to use _VERSION to get the 'a', but type{} is shorter.

This should work in Lua 5.1-5.3. Lua 5.0 doesn't support the string metatable, so it is a bit longer.

Answer 30

Pyke, 2 bytes

Gh

Try it here!

Gh - alphabet[0]