The process was slow, and the first draft of Minimal BASIC was not published until January 1976, leading to it being officially adopted in December 1977 by ECMA, and 1979 by ANSI as X3.60-1978. Minimal BASIC was similar to the 3rd edition, including string variables, while lacking MAT and other advanced features. In contrast, Standard BASIC had many new features that did not exist in other BASICs, and many of these were poorly considered and the subject of some criticism. For instance, the standard included a line-continuation character, but chose the ampersand, , which was also used for string concatenation. Using these in a single line could lead to very confusing code.