I am having hard time making sense of the types in the following example from the Applicative Programming paper: http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~ctm/IdiomLite.pdf


ap :: Monad m ⇒ m (a → b ) → m a → m b
ap mf mx = do
    f ← mf
    x ← mx
    return (f x )
Using this function we could rewrite sequence as:

sequence :: [ IO a ] → IO [ a ]
sequence [ ] = return [ ]
sequence (c : cs ) = return (:) 'ap' c 'ap' sequence cs


I am specifically confused over the type of "m" in:

     return (:) 'ap' c

"c" is obviously an  instance of IO a monad.   "return (:)"  on the other hand (at least as I would expect it) is an instance of " ->" monad. 

a) are the above statements correct?
b) if so, does it make sense for the "ap"  function to have two different instances of the "m"?   

thanks for you help

daryoush