> Pretty much the only hierarchical example that comes to mind is Scratch.
Excel is your first example (and the one that the Eve dev blog keeps referring to while showing examples that aren't very Excel-like visually except insofar as anything which uses a grid as one of its visual elements is "Excel-like"), and Excel's objects are accessed through heirarchical identifiers where the parts of the heirarchy that are local to where the reference is used can be omitted. (Well, sort of; for external files, rather than locality, the path can be omitted if the file is currently open in Excel -- and certain references, notably tables, only work in the same circumstances that allow omitting the path.)
The heirarchy is path -> filename -> defined-name for defined names, and path -> filename -> sheetname -> range for unnamed cells or ranges; each of the steps of this heirarchy are also directly represented in the visual UI you interact with when doing references by point/click/drag rather than textually, as well. So, both in the names and the visual metaphor, Excel is heirarchical.
True, I hadn't considered that. The data-flow is not hierarchical, which is what distinguishes it in my mind, although apparently not in my commenting :)
Let me back up and state my premises more accurately. Most successful visual languages:
* emphasise global data-flow and only have control-flow locally, if at all (eg 'if' expressions in excel)
* support broad, shallow hierarchies for organising large projects but don't require any hierarchy for small projects
* allow data-flow between arbitrary sources/sinks regardless of data organisation
So control-flow hardly exists, data-flow is not hierarchical and the data model has a shallow hierarchy where the leaves are big flat chunks of data.
I suspect that even in organisation, a single strict hierarchy is not the best model. Non-technical users often struggle with hierarchical file-systems and prefer tags or search. File-systems themselves end up needing to implement multiple parents (eg links in linux).
We haven't gotten to large projects yet in Eve but our solution will likely draw from the evolution from hierarchical file-systems to tags, search and 'smart folders'.
Excel is your first example (and the one that the Eve dev blog keeps referring to while showing examples that aren't very Excel-like visually except insofar as anything which uses a grid as one of its visual elements is "Excel-like"), and Excel's objects are accessed through heirarchical identifiers where the parts of the heirarchy that are local to where the reference is used can be omitted. (Well, sort of; for external files, rather than locality, the path can be omitted if the file is currently open in Excel -- and certain references, notably tables, only work in the same circumstances that allow omitting the path.)
The heirarchy is path -> filename -> defined-name for defined names, and path -> filename -> sheetname -> range for unnamed cells or ranges; each of the steps of this heirarchy are also directly represented in the visual UI you interact with when doing references by point/click/drag rather than textually, as well. So, both in the names and the visual metaphor, Excel is heirarchical.