Different byte-code in same major version (2.6.x)?

[Paul Rubin]

Hartmut Goebel <h.goebel at goebel-consult.de> writes:
> a) they are only maintenance releases and changes to bytecode
>    generation would eb a functional change

Why would it be a functional change, if no new bytecodes are introduced
or anything like that?  I thought we were just talking about two
versions of the compiler emitting different code.  It's like if gcc
4.1.3 does some optimization slightly more completely than 4.1.2, so it
emits a slightly different code sequence for some function, that does
exactly the same thing, but is a few cycles faster.  For high assurance
you really have to snapshot the entire compiler.