Hallo IVAN!

 IT>   So, what are you saying, that these are actually (relatively) NEW
 IT>   languages?! Now I'm TOTALLY confused... didn't someone mention that
 IT>   they were used on mainframes or something like that?

There is no contradiction between something being new and something being
used on a mainframe. The mainframe market is alive, even expanding, and IBM
continues to make more than the half of the total company revenue with it.
You must not think of mainframes as cellar filling monsters that require
their own voltage and water supply and have poor performance. Those times
have long passed. A new mainframe is about the size of a large
refrigerator, but can save *slightly* more users than the number of PCs
that would fit into that number (three to four digit numbers). It is
running processors at about 500 MHz (of course they can do much more than
500 MHz Intel things), features up to 1500 MIPS, and is totally fail safe.
It can guarentee each of the 100 to 10000 users the performance that a
single user would have on an average workstation. A mainframe terminal is
graphical, has a nice LCD TFT screen, and is running colorful Java
applications like Lotus e-suite.

The only thing that does not have yet changed about mainframes is the price ;-). 

PL/I, for the other hand, is surely quite old, as compared to
"new" languages like Java or C++. 

Viele Gr��e,
Tobias

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