  This paper presents an extension of the Elias bound on the minimum distance
of codes for discrete alphabets with general, possibly infinite-valued,
distances. The bound is obtained by combining a previous extension of the Elias
bound, introduced by Blahut, with an extension of a bound previously introduced
by the author which builds upon ideas of Gallager, Lov\'asz and Marton. The
result can in fact be interpreted as a unification of the Elias bound and of
Lov\'asz's bound on graph (or zero-error) capacity, both being recovered as
particular cases of the one presented here. Previous extensions of the Elias
bound by Berlekamp, Blahut and Piret are shown to be included as particular
cases of our bound. Applications to the reliability function are then
discussed.
