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Setting attributes on ElementTree.Element objects is broken: it succeeds without exception, but then the following statement fails with AttributeError (unless that statement sets an Element's attribute too):
$ python3.3 test-element-setattr.py 
Hello world!Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "test-element-setattr.py", line 6, in <module>
 print('Hello world!')
AttributeError: ham2

It looks like it's being called from the c extension. I would think it should still throw an exception though?
>>> e = etree.Element
>>> e.ham = 1
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: can't set attributes of built-in/extension type 'xml.etree.ElementTree.Element'

At the end of ElementTree all of the c accelerators are being imported and it looks like only XMLParser is being used. Here is a patch that only imports XMLParser.

This patch should fix the issue of the classes being overwritten by the c accelerated ones.

Forgot to update the XMLParser() assignment.

Replacement of pure-Python classes by C-accelerated classes is intentional.
http://docs.python.org/3.3/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html
"Changed in version 3.3: This module will use a fast implementation whenever available. The xml.etree.cElementTree module is deprecated."

Yes, overwriting the Python classes with C classes is not an error, but the original issue is legit. The error should be more immediately reported.

The problem is that element_setattro is returning a wrong value for error - NULL instead of -1. So the exception is set and is triggered on the next line instead. Will fix for 3.3 and default branches

New changeset 9682241dc8fc by Eli Bendersky in branch '3.3':
Issue #17989: element_setattro returned incorrect error value.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/9682241dc8fc
New changeset b111ae4f83ef by Eli Bendersky in branch 'default':
Issue #17989: element_setattro returned incorrect error value.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/b111ae4f83ef 

Fixed. Thanks for the report!
Python 3.4.0a0 (default:1b760f926846+9682241dc8fc+, May 18 2013, 07:52:49) 
[GCC 4.6.3] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET; j = ET.Element('j')
>>> j.ham = 2
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: Can't set arbitraty attributes on Element
>>>

Looks like a typo in arbitrary.
AttributeError: Can't set arbitraty attributes on Element

New changeset 65680e3a7f07 by Eli Bendersky in branch '3.3':
Issue #17989: fix typo in error message
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/65680e3a7f07
New changeset 19767536ce84 by Eli Bendersky in branch 'default':
Issue #17989: fix typo in error message
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/19767536ce84