The only way that I see your enhancement request working would be if we added a new flag bit that had to be turned on in order to cause this behavior. Otherwise we would be breaking current applications that expect the functionality as it currently exists.
If you wanted a compatible method of finding the length of the returned string you could use the following:
inspect f-entry-name tallying char-count for trailing " "
compute char-count = length of f-entry-name - char-count
or
perform varying char-count from length of f-entry-name by -1 until char-count < 1
if f-entry-name(char-count:1) not = " "
exit perform
end-if
end-perform