variable that has units.  Per report from Stefan Kaltenbrunner.

Backport to 8.2.  I also backported my patch of 2007-06-21 that prevented
comparable overflows on the input side, since that now seems to have enough
field track record to be back-patched safely.  That patch included addition
of hints listing the available unit names, which I did not bother to strip
out of it --- this will make a little more work for the translators, but
they can copy the translation from 8.3, and anyway an untranslated hint
is better than no hint.