  We use the algebraic structure of cyclic codes and some properties of the
discrete Fourier transform to give a reformulation of several classical bounds
for the distance of cyclic codes, by extending techniques of linear algebra. We
propose a bound, whose computational complexity is polynomial bounded, which is
a generalization of the Hartmann-Tzeng bound and the Betti-Sala bound. In the
majority of computed cases, our bound is the tightest among all known
polynomial-time bounds, including the Roos bound.
