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The standard erasure codes (polynomial ones) require that the field size (so alphabet size) is larger than the number of symbols in the codeword. Clearly we can have arbitrarily-close-to-ideal erasure codes even for smaller alphabet sizes (because noisy coding theorem). Are there some that can be easily described?
Haven't found an answer I'd be satisfied with. The simplest way I know of right now is picking a random high density parity code (with the downside of the necessity for randomness in the code's construction and high but still polynomial time complexity of decoding).