Please provide an example.
The prime notation is used to differentiate the variable name while keeping a general meaning ... so t and t' are both "time" but may be for different objects or have different uses as in a place-holder variable.
As Simon says. ( I had to day that!)
In particular, the prime notation is often used to distinguish a "moment about the origin" from a "moment about the mean" of a distribution as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_moment