Oh, that's a really good question. This isn't an answer, but I was curious so I looked, really more of an observation.

It appeared to me that none of the fields that end with a C appear on a screen, only in the table. So, essentially you have a second tracking date that is stored in the back end, constantly initialized and then set with a value in 4GL (I checked), but never displayed.

And a lot of the time in 4GL they are just defaulting the date value to date$ if the value is greater than date$ or there is no date value.