matrix argument parsing eats all the memory instead of rising an error

[Thierry Monteil]

It has been reported on ​this ask question, here is a minimal example:

matrix([ZZ])

[Nils Bruin]

Why is this a bug? ZZ is an iterable, as you can see from

sage: I=iter(ZZ)
sage: [next(I) for i in [1..10]]
[0, 1, -1, 2, -2, 3, -3, 4, -4, 5]

so the user is asking to construct a matrix with one row and countably infinitely many columns. If there would be a way to tell that an iterator is infinite, we could raise an error, but python does not provide such functionality (thanks to the stopping problem). We can't really do anything about this. It does seem appropriate that matrix accepts an iterable that produces iterables.

[Jeroen Demeyer]

I consider this a duplicate of the more general #24757