Naming issues aside, the type of t shouldn't matter, in the same way that the type of a.b() doesn't matter. What matters is how t relates to the code around it. What's the purpose of t in the context where it's used? What does it store? If you don't know whether t is an iterator over a sequence, the timestamp of an event, or the measurement of a sensor, knowing whether t is an int or a string won't help you much. If you do know that, knowing the specific type of t will probably not provide much more additional information, since in any given codebase for almost all non-primitive types there's at most two different types with comparable purpose.