Because there's already 260 of them:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?as_q=&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&hs=ZPa&num=10&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=.asia&as_rights=&safe=off

As you mention, most programming languages are written in American; I think the word English should be avoided unless it is. There's no reason a programming language can't be written in English, or in any other language / script; in fact I'm sure there are some out there, I think BBC Basic spells colour correctly at least. America tends to dominate because of its population and economy. I'm sure if someone wrote a PHP type language in Hindu it would spread pretty fast. The problem would be getting a world-wide user base, especially in the rich western countries.

Errr, the first page are all domain registrars and the second page says the rest are duplicates so there are no real sites yet.

I think they're just registering at the moment and won't go live until next year.

Of course there are such things, and have been for a long time, but for obvious reasons our English-speaking editor has never heard of them. They tend to remain local to their "linguistic area", and even there are just a small niche for elementary programing education, or end-user scripting. Major programing projects need sophisticated tools with a larger base of both tools and experienced developers, which these local languages normally lack.

I'm aware of one case where non-English based language was used for big things: a lot of public administration software in Finland used to be written in "FAS", which according to some examples I have seen (punched cards reused as children's hobby material!) used keywords based on Finnish. [By the way, does anyone else reading this know of a good reference for the language? There is very little about it on the net]

There's nothing new here. I remember seeing French Algol 60 compilers back in the late 60s. Its simple to do - just replace the compiler's token list and parser rules with the appropriate tokens and rules for the language of your choice:

debut

si a[i] = b alors allez L1;

fin

..and these days we have Unicode, so its easy to extend to Cyrillic, Katakana and even idogrammic languages. Of course, a Mancunian won't be able to read a Cyrillic Java program unless he can read Russian, but that's a different problem. Its called "learning foreign languages at school" though it may not be too difficult to write dialect translators for a programming language.

I don't see the same problem applying to web pages, because most people won't be interested in looking at pages in languages and alphabets they can't read, so not being able to understand http://squiggle is a non-issue. Besides, its what Babelfisf Mk II is for. Its not exactly difficult to load several tag sets into a web browser so that it can correctly display pages coded in other languages. Granted there is an issue with right-to-left text, but as browsetrs can already deal with Arabic, this is scarcely a show stopper.

Last but not least, sorting out these problems with web browsers and graphical interfaces will give the browser and OS writers something to do. It will stop them getting bored and noodling around adding useless "features" to their programs.

C# / visual studio already DO support arbitrary charactersets... the following works:

double π = Math.Atan(1) * 4;

MessageBox.Show(π.ToString());

"There's nothing new here. I remember seeing French Algol 60 compilers back in the late 60s. Its simple to do - just replace the compiler's token list and parser rules with the appropriate tokens and rules for the language of your choice:"

Er. Obviously having made sure that any variable/object names in source code don't end up becoming reserved words by the compiler!

Lets hope we don't try to make the compiler's thousands-separator locale-specific. Ouch.

The embarrassment of not having a .uk top-level domain causes needless work for pretty much everyone in .co.uk Britain. If we can't have .uk, can we at least have .gb or .eng?

"Er. Obviously having made sure that any variable/object names in source code don't end up becoming reserved words by the compiler!"

In principle, this cannot happen in Algol 60. The spec requires the reserved words are special symbols that cannot collide with variables. How this is done is implementation-specific. Some systems required the keywords in quotes. See "stropping" in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stropping

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One of my personal soap-boxes, this. How hard could it be for browsers to recognise <centre> and "colour" and treat them the same as <center> and "color"? It would take pretty much no effort at all to allow English words (as well as Americaneze ones) in languages like HTML. So why doesn't it happen?

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What would be the point? It's just adding additional bloat to the browsers and making them even less small form-factor friendly (more disk/memory intensive)... ok, in you're example it's only a teeeeeny bit. Let's also add <mitte> <zentrum> etc etc etc....

I'm not overly bothered as to which language it's based on AS LONG AS IT'S STANDARDISED! (hmmm used an 's' there, I must be English... can't even standardise standardise).

There have been many examples of programing languages with kewords in different languages; French Algol is only one. The issue of keyword homonyms due to unicode keyspace was also extensively discussed in the unicode world years ago.

But the fact is that it's no more alien for a non-English speaker to use "<font>" or "for (i=0; i<x; i++);" than it is for an English speaker to use "Allegro" or "Da Capo a la Fine." Or eat camembert or sushi. Or even say "OK".

People world wide understand all of these "technical" and "alien" terms. What's the big deal?

I remember attending a seminar about DNS back in 2001 where I was told that internationalisation, iirc Unicode characters, was just around the corner. BIND9 has supported it for some time.

Wah lau! What are these "Singaporean" characters of which you write? English and Bahasa Melayu both use the Roman alphabet, Mandarin is written in Simplified Chinese, while Tamil uses... Tamil.

So many worms... sounds like a Phishing expedition.

While .tv was originall createdas the ccTLD for Tuvalu, that country sold it to somebody else for some insane amount of money (relative to their GDP. Something like $8000 per head of population - it's a small island). So, while it wasn't created as the Television TLD, it has effectively become that since the country that owned it,sold it.