Shift+F8 was added to speed up the Eiffel compilation by only checking the changes in the override clusters and nothing else. I guess we should also take into account the changes in the ECF if any.

Alt+F8 and F7 will trigger a recompilation if anything changes in the ECF.

And when changing the assertion level you actually need to generate some code to tell on which class assertions are monitored. Technically it does not need a full compilation if the changes were generated in a separate file from the executable, but since it is part of the executable, it requires the compilation.