[grn]

Comments are useful when they provide information that is not in the code (e.g. rationale for the choice of an algorithm, source of a regular expression that parses an URL). Your example HTML encoding function can be coded as:

    def clean(foo)
        return [foo, foo.apply_html_encoding]
    end

The encoding logic should be contained in apply_html_encoding. The point is that most of the functions/methods that are 65 lines long are badly coded.