Delimiters in MySQL

Question

I often see people are using Delimiters. I tried myself to find out what are delimiters and what is their purpose. After 20 minutes of googling, I was not able to find an an

Answer 1

The DELIMITER statement changes the standard delimiter which is semicolon ( ;) to another. The delimiter is changed from the semicolon( ;) to double-slashes //.

Why do we have to change the delimiter?

Because we want to pass the stored procedure, custom functions etc. to the server as a whole rather than letting mysql tool to interpret each statement at a time.