Views are supposed to be dumb, this means also that you should not create variables inside of one to give to another, you should not give too much resposibility to a view.
The best way to provide global variables to Blade Views and make sure they will be available at any time is using View::share()
:
View::share('STYLE_PATH_CSS', 'styleFolder/foundation/css');
View::share('STYLE_PATH_JS', 'styleFolder/foundation/js');
View::share('STYLE_PATH_JS_VENDOR', 'styleFolder/foundation/js/vendor');
You can add this to a composers.php file and load it in your app/start/global.php
:
require app_path().'/composers.php';
Take a look at the docs: http://laravel.com/docs/responses#views