English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am confused if I should use a comma in the following series? Note that there is no "and" in the series, and all the three adjectives, i.e., powerful, high-throughput and low-complexity are modifying the word "decoder".
This requires a powerful high-throughput low-complexity soft-output decoder for LDPC codes.
or
This requires a powerful, high-throughput, low-complexity, soft-output decoder for LDPC codes.
I would use every comma except the last one in your second example. 'Soft output decoder' can essentially be treated as a single term. You could write "I'm looking for a powerful soft output decoder", the same could be done with any of the three adjectives. Each of the three adjectival terms should be separated by a comma, but the list of adjectives doesn't need to be separated from the term they are modifying.
I think this would be best:
This requires a powerful, high-throughput, low-complexity soft-output decoder for LDPC codes.
If you want to treat soft-output as a 4th modifier for decoder then I think your second example is correct, but I feel like that would be non conventional.
Both are correct, the second one with the commas 'reads' better.
Apologies if this misses the point of the question but maybe the sentence could be restructured to avoid the problem entirely?
"For LDPC codes, a decoder that is powerful, high-throughput, low-complexity and soft-output is required."
