Before the patch, running the GNU tbl(1) preprocessor on the
troff file app.codes.nr would give a warning
$ tbl app.codes.nr >app.codes.nr.2
tbl:app.codes.nr:139: no real data
tbl:app.codes.nr:139: giving up on this table
and the table of suffixes
.z no arguments
.l 16-bit argument
... ...
would be left out of the tbl output.