(Email from Vincent Manis)
Problem: Raising arbitrary objects as exceptions has been found to be nasty in some other languages (Python and C++ in particular).
This one is a tad speculative, but I'm reluctant to encourage people to write things like (raise 4), because of course it doesn't respect any module boundaries. I think the intent with the descriptions of raise and raise-continuable was to allow exception hierarchies to be added in WG2 without constraining them here. I would suggest adding a new procedure:
(make-error-object message obj ...)
to creates the implementation-defined object error is supposed to create, and adding a sentence to the raise and raise-continuable entries that says "The effect of applying this procedure to an object not created via make-error-object is implementation-defined." This allows WG2 to do what it wants regarding exception objects, and to limit the types of exception objects allowed, without breaking anything in WG1. Error can be defined as:
(define (error message . objs) (apply make-error-object message objs))
We voted no.