Why do Python's math.ceil() and math.floor() operations return floats instead of integers?

Question

Can someone explain this (straight from the docs- emphasis mine):

math.ceil(x) Return the ceiling of x as a float, the small

Answer 1

The range of floating point numbers usually exceeds the range of integers. By returning a floating point value, the functions can return a sensible value for input values that lie outside the representable range of integers.

Consider: If floor() returned an integer, what should floor(1.0e30) return?

Now, while Python's integers are now arbitrary precision, it wasn't always this way. The standard library functions are thin wrappers around the equivalent C library functions.