It *did*
auto-format the code... but as these were the earliest
examples of what I think was incremental compiler technology,
you'd be typing the source text, and when you committed a syntax
error, the offending element was highlighted by a dashed-lined
circle, and further entry stopped until you corrected your
mistake.
This sounds like the Cornell Program Synthesizer developed
by long-time Cornell professor Tim Teitelbaum. It was used to
teach Pascal to tens of thousands of students at several large
universities in the early 80s, on Teraks and perhaps other
computers. I think he gets the credit for developing the
first practical language-sensitive editor, the progenitor
of most IDEs out there today.
Back in the early days of Apple II, my friend Randy Hyde wrote LISA, the
Laser Interactive Symbolic Assembler. Syntax was checked by the editor when
you hit return at the end of each line, and errors were immediately
flagged, or if all correct the line of code was tokenized with effectively
the first pass of the assembly process. Since all accepted lines were
tokenized, it was easy to also make the display formatted to anything you
wanted. Its still one of the best, fastest IDE's I've worked with, albeit
it only made 6502 and its variations of code, and ran AFAIK only on Apple
II and variants, last on the IIgs.