The Support of a Subset a C Is Deened as Supp a =

{ 14 { almost aane representation. Linear matroids form a subset of the class of almost aane matroids; as proved in 41], this inclusion is proper. Let D be the matrix that represents, almost aanely, a given matroid M. The rows of D form a subset of f1;:::;qg n called an almost aane code C. As usual in coding theory, one can introduce the set of local distance polynomials of this code as follows: where A i;c = jfc 0 2 C : dist(c; c 0) = igj: One of the results in 41] shows that the A c (x; y) does not depend on c and satisses the same properties as the weight polynomial of linear codes. Consequently, it is also connected to the Tutte and reliability polynomials of M by the same relations as above.