Silly user input causing MATLAB to grind to a halt

set(gca, 'YTick', 0:10*1e4);

Causes my (OSX) MATLAB to grid to a halt. Of course, I should have written:

set(gca, 'YTick', 0:1e4:10*1e4);

But I did not. And nothing can fix this but killing my application (or possibly, waiting for 2 weeks).

Would it not be possible to do some sanity tests on user input and throw a warning if this or similar operations are expected to cost more than a few minutes, or exhaust all of the available memory?