laravelbook/ardent — pull request #72 by mdwheele (2013-07-18 20:57:00+00:00)
Title: Restored PHP 5.3 functionality.  Issue #68.

I hit this issue today working on a project and made the following quick fix to get it working in 5.3 again. The other option we considered was to include the $debug declaration inside in the conditional. This looks cleaner, in my opinion.