My “foolproof” comment was based on Vandermonde matrices not always being invertible during decoding without an extra step, which tripped up multiple implementations. (PAR1 suffered from this problem, then they tried to fix it with PAR2 but still failed!)

I think we discussed a while ago doing Vandermonde decoding without matrix inversion, so that’s one advantage that Vandermonde matrices have. (Although I haven’t seen an implementation do that optimization.)

I don’t actually know if Cauchy matrices apply for error correction and not just erasure codes —- I’d be interested if other people know!