  Shearer and McEliece [1977] showed that there is no MacWilliams identity for
the free distance spectra of orthogonal linear convolutional codes. We show
that on the other hand there does exist a MacWilliams identity between the
generating functions of the weight distributions per unit time of a linear
convolutional code C and its orthogonal code C^\perp, and that this
distribution is as useful as the free distance spectrum for estimating code
performance. These observations are similar to those made recently by
Bocharova, Hug, Johannesson and Kudryashov; however, we focus on terminating by
tail-biting rather than by truncation.
