[rkangel]

I haven't used Beast, but I have used make a lot. One answer might be "just in case someone wants to put a space in a filename, or in any parent folder of where my code is".

Make does not cope with this at all. Yes I'm aware of all the workarounds and they all fall over at some point. Make works perfectly well on Windows for instance, except for the whole generation of Windows that had the users under "Documents and settings". Was almost always impossible to build code in the user home directory.