[GeeTwo]

In your situation, I'll unhesitatingly recommend java. Unless you already know c++ quite well, or are working from a considerable existing code base, or are doing something requiring really tight optimization, the "advantages" of C++ over java are really just more rope to hang yourself. It sounds like none of these apply in your situation. Outside of assembler, about the only thing which can cause as much confusion as a pointer arithmetic error with so little effort on the part of the programmer is an abused FORTRAN common block, and for pretty much the same reason.