This requires Make to parse the files in some way. What I find nice about Make is that there's no magic. I can use Make to drive builds of C, D, fortran objects

This requires Make to parse the files in some way. What I find nice about Make is that there's no magic. I can use Make to drive builds of C, D, fortran objects and link them together, throw in some Java, transform markdown into html, generate graphs with graphviz and build pdfs with latex. In those cases I'm positively hopeful that Make won't try to do any magic except building its dependency graph, see which files are older than their deps, and do the actions as described. Make is no silver bullet, but it does a hell of a job at building and binding together non-ideal stuff.