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It is the year 87,539,319 and solitary space-walking is now commonplace, many people travel into space by themselves, propelled by nothing but a jetpack on their backs, programming their course with a personal computer and keyboard as they go.
You are one such person; you were out on a lovely, peaceful spacewalk, when, all of a sudden, you were ensnared by the gravity of a black hole!
As you plummet towards this black hole, spiraling ever faster inwards, you realise your one chance of survival is to broadcast a distress message, and hope a nearby ship comes to rescue you.
So, you break out your keyboard, and begin typing away a program.
Your program can be in any language, and must print HELP!
to stdout (your PC broadcasts all stdout far into the depths of space.)
However, as you are near a blackhole, your keyboard is slowly being ripped to shreds!
Assume you are using a QWERTY keyboard like the one below, and that the blackhole is to your left;
Remember, left and right shift are two different keys.
after every keypress, the left-most row of your keyboard (keys covered by left-most red line) is ripped off and flung into the black hole!
So, your first keypress could be any key on the keyboard, but from then onwards none of the leftmost Tab, Caps, Shift, Ctrl or ` keys may be used, at all. (r-shift and r-ctrl can still be used)
After the next keypress, the keys 1, Q, A,Z and Alt are flung into the abyss, and may not be used thereafter. After that, you lose Space, X, S, W, 2 and so forth.
Obviously, you want to complete your program as quickly as possible, so that rescue-time is increased; therefore, this is code-golf, and the shortest program in key presses wins!
Each answer should provide a list of keypresses, so, if my answer was this program (in the language squardibblyack)
!HELP\.
a keylist could look like:
Shift!HELP release shift \.
length: 8
I'm worried this challenge might be too difficult, but I'd love to see the kinds of answers submitted!
Downvote? I would much rather some feedback. – theonlygusti – 2015-04-23T17:39:06.257
13I'm downvoting this because it feels too constrained to have much creativity. – isaacg – 2015-04-23T17:44:22.503
@trichoplax Your right shift? – Mast – 2015-04-23T17:53:47.387
@trichoplax I think I've cleared all mentioned ambiguities, are there any more I should "iron out"? – theonlygusti – 2015-04-23T18:36:47.330
I've deleted my comments that you have now addressed, and this looks much better. Your link to my comment will no longer work since I've deleted the comment, so you might need to edit that back to normal text. – trichoplax – 2015-04-23T18:43:51.990
4Can we assume that using the python shell without
print
qualifies as STDOUT? – user80551 – 2015-04-23T20:02:59.637I've never before seen a challenge here with such a small max character limit. 13 or fewer (more like 10-11 if you need shift and don't end with ) – Sparr – 2015-04-23T20:18:05.420
3What if my keyboard has a number pad? – mbomb007 – 2015-04-23T20:24:27.980
4This could be slightly better with arrow keys. – user80551 – 2015-04-23T20:27:29.283
1I don't see why people are still voting to close this question as unclear. How much ever restrictive/difficult be the challenge, its pretty clear after the recent edits. – Optimizer – 2015-04-23T20:48:13.780
6Is caps lock still effective if it's been pressed although the key has disappeared? – jscs – 2015-04-23T21:26:52.690
3@JoshCaswell I would assume so, since you don't need to hold it down. Test it on your keyboard. You'll need to find a black hole, first. But it's probably better to hold rt. shift instead... – mbomb007 – 2015-04-23T21:46:27.183
I give up if I can't use my keyboard's number pad. I haven't found another language that can do what CJam did in the same code length. – mbomb007 – 2015-04-23T21:54:58.287
I had the great idea to use GoLunar, but it's still too long... :( – mbomb007 – 2015-04-23T22:32:58.743
You know what they say about assumptions, @mbomb007. – jscs – 2015-04-24T07:45:42.487
Agreed with @isaacg, if the char limit tempo was slower this could make for an interesting challenge, but now it's getting a few answers at best instead. – Nit – 2015-04-24T14:12:49.323
What are the rules on derivative puzzles? I thought of a more relaxed challenge ("touch-typist's edition" - releasing modifier keys is free, and you can press one key with each hand [in any order] per cycle) that might get more responses. – Random832 – 2015-04-24T19:19:15.473