More information:

The task is text processing; whatever formats they receive are converted to a delimited file and processed from there.

"Pure text processing" can still lead to using the language to its fullest--I'm guessing you mean opening a file, running replaces, and closing the file; nothing more? (A while(<>){s///;}in Perl). I'm wondering where SPITBOL stands in terms of nested data structures, modules, and the like.

The benchmarking is a good idea; I'll have to see what comes out of this meeting and if they want to spend time on comparisons, or if the decision is really already made. I just wanted to go into this as educated as possible--Thanks for your feedback.