  The problem of identifying whether the family of cyclic codes is
asymptotically good or not is a long-standing open problem in the field of
coding theory. It is known in the literature that some families of cyclic codes
such as BCH codes and Reed-Solomon codes are asymptotically bad, however in
general the answer to this question is not known. A recent result by Nelson and
Van Zwam shows that, all linear codes can be obtained by a sequence of
puncturing and/or shortening of a collection of asymptotically good
codes~\cite{Nelson_2015}. In this paper, we prove that any linear code can be
obtained by a sequence of puncturing and/or shortening of some cyclic code.
Therefore the result that all codes can be obtained by shortening and/or
puncturing cyclic codes leaves the possibility open that cyclic codes are
asymptotically good.
