5.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 punch cards were the main form of data entry for programming. One punch 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. Today, the most commonly used computer languages allow a lot more leeway for formatting. One line of text no longer necessarily corresponds to one line of code.
