Even and doubly-even binary codes #
Binary Hamming weights detect Euclidean orthogonality: the dot product is the parity of the intersection of supports, and the weight of a sum subtracts twice that intersection. Consequently, a binary linear code whose weights are all divisible by four is self-orthogonal.
An even code is characterized by membership of the all-ones word in its dual. In particular, a binary self-dual code is even and contains the all-ones word. These facts supply the elementary parity constraints used in the study of doubly-even self-dual codes.
The conventions and weight-intersection argument follow Huffman and Pless, Fundamentals of Error-Correcting Codes, Chapters 1 and 9.
For binary words, the weight of a sum plus twice the size of the support intersection is the sum of the weights.
A binary word has self-dot-product equal to its weight modulo two.
Pairing a binary word with the all-ones word gives its weight modulo two.
The coordinates of the 0/1 lift of a binary word sum to its weight.
The sum of two binary words of weights divisible by four again has weight divisible by four exactly when the two words are orthogonal.
A binary code is even if all its words have even Hamming weight.
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A binary code is doubly even if all its Hamming weights are divisible by four.
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Evenness can be checked word by word.
Double evenness can be checked by divisibility of the weight of each word by four.
Every doubly-even code is even.
Evenness passes to subcodes.
Double evenness passes to subcodes.
An even binary code is precisely one whose dual contains the all-ones word.
For binary codes, evenness is exactly containment in the single-parity-check code.
Every self-orthogonal binary code is even.
A doubly-even binary linear code is self-orthogonal.
A self-dual binary code contains the all-ones word.