Practical Reed-Solomon for Programmers

Each of the original 4 packets now has a 25% hole in it! To recover from that, the R-S decoder needs to know exactly which parts of the message got lost. R-S continues to work just as well, even if you know none of your padding will ever get corrupted. As noted in Theory and practice of error control codes, Reed-Solomon is indeed "Perfect", but only if your problem fits neatly on what R-S can do. The R-S block size is a hard parameter, and it might not be what you need. While R-S can fix and detect damage in the maximum theoretical amount of symbols, you might not be thinking in terms of symbols, but more in terms of number of bit flips. R-S often has a role as a concatenated code together with a soft decision decoder. R-S is generally not needed to protect data on disk or during IP network transmission against individual byte errors.