[Matplotlib-users] Assign colors to list?

Hi All,

I was wondering how I take a list of 250 discrete values and match up each
value in the list to a color in the gist_rainbow colormap. I want the
highest value to be red, and the lowest value to be blue. I then want to
plot a point for each value in the list, and the point's color should
represent its value. I cannot use contourf or any other function that does
this automatically on a continuous grid--I need to plot individual points.

I have tried creating my own colormap with:

my_colors = matplotlib.colors.Colormap(my_list)

but when I issue a pyplot.plot() command with the argument cmap=my_colors, I
get "TypeError: There is no patch property "cmap"

How do I do this correctly?

Cheers,
Katie