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

Before Python 2.4, an integer couldn't hold the full range of truncated real numbers.

http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.4.html#pep-237-unifying-long-integers-and-integers