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Asked: 2026-05-27T14:33:05+00:00

Can someone explain this (straight from the docs – emphasis mine): math.ceil(x) Return the

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

math.ceil(x) Return the ceiling of x as a float, the smallest integer value greater than or equal to x.

math.floor(x) Return the floor of x as a float, the largest integer value less than or equal to x.

Why would .ceil and .floor return floats when they are by definition supposed to calculate integers?

EDIT:

Well this got some very good arguments as to why they should return floats, and I was just getting used to the idea, when @jcollado pointed out that they in fact do return ints in Python 3…

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    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.

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