outsourcing hosting options…

Here’s the deal:

I am planning on employing the services of Hostway (www.hostway.com) to host my site. It lists under available tools items such as C++ and gcc, as well as Python and Perl. What I am wondering is if these tools allow me to run tools off the server machine. For instance, I will develop a piece of software to perform the task of handling the mailing list (as I want complete control of it), will I be able to configure the server machine so that every morning at a given time it will run my mailing list application? Or are these just tools to be accessed from CGI?

Thanks a lot,
Matthew B