necessity but rather by simplicity. We could have developed Weyl- Heisenberg theory over free abelian groups of finite rank or more generally developed both topics over locally compact abelian groups. However, except for having to dis­ cuss conditions for convergence, Haar measures, and other standard topics from analysis the underlying structures would essentially be the same. A re­ cent collection of papers [17] provides an excellent review of time-frequency analysis over locally compact abelian groups. A further reason for limiting the scope of generality is that our results can be immediately applied to the design of algorithms and codes for time­ frequency processing.