But type is a machine-readable way to say what a variable does or is. A compiler can certainly know a name from a password if its type support is versatile enough and you use separate types for them. Or, for example, for things like "unchecked C string", "valid UTF-8 C string", "NKFD-normalized UTF-8 C string", etc. A separate type for password may be a jolly good idea with a logging system you can dump any data to; you certainly wouldn't want it to log passwords.

Using prefixes is a poor man's type system, a loose convention to be enforced by humans, while with types it would be a machine-readable and enforceable requirement.