Why do I need a double slash when mounting Windows shares?

Question

linux

Good day.
I understand that the question is stupid, and in principle I have already found the answer myself, but I am wildly interested in why it is so, and not otherwise? I hope your answer will help me better understand how nix systems work.
There is a share on Win2012
I want to mount it on a CentOS7 machine.
I do this
[[email protected] ~]# mount.cifs \\10.10.10.12\distr /var/www/html/owncloud/data/serveit/files -o user=distr,domain=10.10.10.12,pass=
pass I get
mount.cifs: bad UNC (\10.10.10.12distr)
But if I do
[[email protected] ~]# mount.cifs \\\\10.10.10.12\\distr /var/www/html/owncloud/data/serveit/ files -o user=distr,domain=10.10.10.12,pass=pass
then everything clings perfectly.
Poke your finger where to read in order to understand why a double slash is needed, and in what cases is it still used?
Thank you very much in advance:)

Answer 1

On unix, escape with \. So the view entry \\means one \in "safe text" form.
But each character must be escaped separately, so \\\\ = \\
In the general case, escaping is required | & ; < > ( ) $ ` \ " ' пробел и перевод строки and* ? [ ] # ~ = %

Answer 2

To mount cifs, the path can be specified as //host/share.