New families of non-Reed-Solomon MDS codes

MDS codes have garnered significant attention due to their wide applications in practice. To date, most known MDS codes are equivalent to Reed-Solomon codes. The construction of non-Reed-Solomon (non-RS) type MDS codes has emerged as an intriguing and important problem in both coding theory and finite geometry. Although some constructions of non-RS type MDS codes have been presented in the literature, the parameters of these MDS codes remain subject to strict constraints. In this paper, we introduce a general framework of constructing $[n,k]$ MDS codes using the idea of selecting a suitable set of evaluation polynomials and a set of evaluation points such that all nonzero polynomials have at most $k-1$ zeros in the evaluation set. Moreover, these MDS codes can be proved to be non-Reed-Solomon by computing their Schur squares. Furthermore, several explicit constructions of non-RS MDS codes are given by converting to combinatorial problems. As a result, new families of non-RS MDS codes with much more flexible lengths can be obtained and most of them are not covered by the known results.