Is there a more elegant way to get different values (types) from a function

Hi,

I'm scripting some kind procedural level builder acting like a worm going through a 3Darray of cells. In some parts of the code, I just want to check how many cells surrounding the worm's actual position have a certain status (eg. empty or filled), in other ones I'll want to have a precise status of each cells in a certain order.

As Javascript doesn't allow for multiple refs/out, I'm going like this : to check how many cells are empty I call a function sending a Vector3 of the worm's current position and waiting for an int in return:

var zeroes : int = CheckNeighbors(currentWormPos);

To check the status of each cell counterclockwise I call the same function but this time sending the Vector3 as three ints and waiting for a string in return:

var neighbours : String = CheckNeighbors(currentWormPos.x, currentWormPos.x, currentWormPos.x);

And so here's my called function and it's overloaded sister : function CheckNeighbors(coord:Vector3){ var up : int = my3DArray[coord.x,coord.y,coord.z+1]; var left : int = my3DArray[coord.x-1,coord.y,coord.z]; var down : int = my3DArray[coord.x,coord.y,coord.z-1]; var right : int = my3DArray[coord.x+1,coord.y,coord.z];

 var zeroes : int = 0;    
 if (up == 0){ zeroes++; }
 if (left == 0){ zeroes++; }
 if (down == 0){ zeroes++; }
 if (right == 0){ zeroes++; }
 return zeroes;

 var neighborhood : String = up.ToString()+left.ToString()+down.ToString()+right.ToString();
 return neighborhood;

}

As I assume it'll work as is, I just wanted to know if there's any way more elegant to achieve this.