Idle is not accepting backslashes on some Mac OSX keyboards

[mounty]

Hi list,

I am using a German keyboard on Mac OS X 10.4.11. Idle 1.2.2 is constantly blocking entering the backslash character '\'
which is for instance  perfectly accepted by my mail application, as you can see for yourself. If I switch to an US,
Australian or English keyboard layout the backslash can be entered. Unfortunately this key position is the pound- sign
'#' on a German keyboard. The same applies to (German) Switzerland and Austrian keyboards as well.

google lists several inquiries like this one:
http://bugs.python.org/issue3493

It seems to me that the backslash is hard coded to the physical key in Idle. However this key position is occupied by
the '#' pound-sign in the lower-case position of the German keyboard layout. The upper case letter for this physical key
is a single quote "'". If I copy the backslash character from a different application into idle, the character will be
processed. And as there is no input problem with the terminal program which is shipped with OS X, the problem should be
somewhere in Idle. IMHO of course.

Here is a photo of the German keyboard layout:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:2007_09_30_de_Apple-Tastatur.jpg

If anybody is curious about how we have to enter a backslash, it's "Alt-Shift-7" no matter if you are using OS X,
Windows or Linux.

Can anyone advise how to proceed. Many thanks
Ulf