Negacyclic codes of length [Formula: see text] over the Galois ring [Formula: see text] are linearly ordered under set-theoretic inclusion, i.e., they are the ideals [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], of the chain ring [Formula: see text]. This structure is used to obtain the symbol-pair distances of all such negacyclic codes. Among others, for the special case when the alphabet is the finite field [Formula: see text] (i.e., [Formula: see text]), the symbol-pair distance distribution of constacyclic codes over [Formula: see text] verifies the Singleton bound for such symbol-pair codes, and provides all maximum distance separable symbol-pair constacyclic codes of length [Formula: see text] over [Formula: see text].
Read full abstract