[newbie] ./ .... why?

[Han2097]

It took a while to catch onto the ./ thingy..  now that I know it, I still 
don't understand *why* this is necessary.  I know, it's easy enough to add it 
to .bash_profile or wherever, but is there a justifiable reason why Linux 
makes you specify that the program you want to execute is in the current 
directory?

<xml version="1.0" standalone="yes" encoding="UTF-8">
<mumble>this is so weird...</mumble>
</xml>

hehe, sorry...

Dan