There seems to be an error or something weird going on with bioconductor and smart vs curly quotes.
This line below was written in MS word, where quotes appear normal, the code runs fine if copied and pasted into R. However, if copied and pasted into an R script and then run from R, the two different types of quotes appear and you get a Syntax error. Very strange.
solution: don't copy it into a script, or change to all smart quotes!
p1=new("phenoData",pData=data.frame(sample=c(rep("normal",2),rep("treated",2)), day=c(“Jan-10-2006”,”Jan-11-2006”,”Jan-10-2006”,”Jan-12-2006”)), varLabels=list(sample=”description about what sample means”,day=”for example, date of the hybridization experiement”), varMetadata=data.frame(varNames=c("Sample",”day”)))