By 'unforgiving of errors' I was referring to those times when the pre-processor and compiler don't realise you've done something dumb with a variable and caused a value (or values) to be sent into an area of memory reserved for use by the O/S.

On a PC running Windoze, this generally either gives you the "blue screen of death" (a blue screen with a bunch of hex characters on) or does the same thing as pressing the reset button.

In other words, you have to reboot or the computer does that for itself without asking.

Well, I've used BASIC, C, COBOL, Perl, PHP, a little Z80 assembler and a tiny bit of JavaScript. I've also read articles and books about Pascal and Modula 2, but haven't actually used them.

Out of those, I would assume that JavaScript is the closest to Java, although I've never actually seen Java code.