You can unpack any iterator with an asterisk, but the type of collection is still unspecified. Try printing out an iterator such as map, filter, or enumerate. Then try to print that object with an asterisk. You can see the numbers, but if you look closely, there is no parenetheses or square brackets or curly brackets. The unpacked numbers also can't be indexed if you didn't specify the collection type such as list, tuple, dictionary, or set