Aspects of the subject matter described herein relate to imperative attribution. In aspects, metadata of a managed runtime environment may be set by imperative statements included in code of a program executing in the managed runtime environment. The metadata may be associated with lookup data that identifies the metadata. The lookup data may be formed from an identifier supplied by an imperative statement and an identifier of a logical element which may be explicitly or implicitly supplied. The metadata may be computed at parse time, run time, or another time and may be computed based on state available to a managed runtime environment at the time the metadata is computed.