The theory of cyclic codes and a generalization to additive codes (Q1598872)

The author starts with a new approach to the theory of linear cyclic codes (although the reviewer feels that it is at least very similar to the description of linear cyclic codes by the prescription of zeroes in an extension field, see for example [\textit{F. J. MacWilliams} and \textit{N. J. A. Sloane}, The theory of error-correcting codes, Elsevier Science Publishers (1977; Zbl 0369.94008), Ch. 7]). He next considers constacylic codes, i.e. linear codes which are monomically equivalent to a code \(C\) with the property that there is a non-zero element \(f\) such that for each \((c_{n-1},c_{n-2},\dots ,c_{0})\) in \(C\), also \((c_{n-2},c_{n-3},\dots ,c_{0}, f x c_{n-1})\) is in \(C\). He shows how, under certain conditions, a cyclic \([\nu,k,du]\) code can be ``contracted'' to a const acyclic \([n,k,d]\) code. Finally, he develops a theory of additive cyclic codes over \(\text{GF}(q^m),\) i.e., codes for which any linear combination of codes with elements from \(\text{GF}(q)\) is again a codeword. As indicated by the author, additive codes were considered before by \textit{J. M. Jensen} [Subgroup subcodes, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 41, 781-785 (1995; Zbl 0835.94015)] and by \textit{M. Hattori, R. J. McEliece} and \textit{G. Solomon} [Subspace subcodes of Reed-Solomon codes, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 44, 1861-1880 (1998; Zbl 0953.94031)].