Reading used to be supremely difficult. A piece used to be read aloud - after several personal practice sessions to gain familiarity with the text. In the 4th

Reading used to be supremely difficult. A piece used to be read aloud - after several personal practice sessions to gain familiarity with the text. In the 4th century being able to read silently was notably strange. We've refactored the process quite a bit since then: Splitting individual words. Introducing capitals to highlight paragraph boundaries and proper names. Punctuation to speed up parsing. Inter-paragraph spacing and semantic and syntactic conventions to improve concept parsing. Etc., etc. I see no reason to believe we are done yet. :-)