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by veloxo 752 days ago
"Coke can" is a phrasal adjective here and ought to be hyphenated, which removes the ambiguity: "Coke-can planimeter"
1 comments

I don't think that's mandatory.

Noun phrases can be arbitrarily long in English and don't require connecting words or hyphens. This can be very confusing to people whose first language doesn't have this feature. Classic example: "Heathrow airport customer car park", a five word noun phrase (IE, noun noun noun noun noun) that native speakers find completely normal.