  A new lower bound on the minimum distance of q-ary cyclic codes is proposed.
This bound improves upon the Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) bound and, for
some codes, upon the Hartmann-Tzeng (HT) bound. Several Boston bounds are
special cases of our bound. For some classes of codes the bound on the minimum
distance is refined. Furthermore, a quadratic-time decoding algorithm up to
this new bound is developed. The determination of the error locations is based
on the Euclidean Algorithm and a modified Chien search. The error evaluation is
done by solving a generalization of Forney's formula.
