This is part of the ALFE types series.
Variant is a type that can hold any value. It's the type of all variables in a dynamically typed language. It's a bit like a sum type consisting of all other types summed together.
In practice it's probably not very useful, since to do anything with a Variant variable you have to cast it to some type, and since there's a finite number of casts that you can write in one program, you might as well just make it a sum type of those. Still, it might come in handy for translating some programs written in other languages into ALFE, or even if you just don't want to have to think too much about what the possible types are.