Origins
At the time that people began using SLOC as a metric, the most commonly used languages, such as FORTRAN and assembler, were line-oriented languages. These languages were developed at the time when punched cards were the main form of data entry for programming. One punched card usually represented one line of code. It was one discrete object that was easily counted. It was the visible output of the programmer so it made sense to managers to count lines of code as a measurement of a programmer's productivity, even referring to such as "card images". Today, the most commonly used computer languages allow a lot more leeway for formatting. Text lines are no longer limited to 80 or 96 columns, and one line of text no longer necessarily corresponds to one line of code.
Read more about this topic: Source Lines Of Code
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