The MacWilliams identity (Q1973437)

The celebrated MacWilliams identity in coding theory gives a fundamental relation between the weight enumerators of the code and its dual. The standard proof of this theorem uses character theory. This paper gives a very short, elegant and elementary proof of the MacWilliams identity. The main idea in the proof is to use induction and to consider the contribution to the weight enumerator obtained from all the punctured and shortened codes of the code.